I & I Editorial BoardThe cranky Vermont senator who believes billionaires should be abolished wants to legislate them out of existence. It’s too bad that he doesn’t understand that one billionaire is more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders.
“Billionaires should not exist,” Sanders, who identifies as a socialist, raged in 2019 during his previous attempt to hit the wealthy with an additional tax that punished them for their success.
That effort, the New York Times reported, was “particularly aggressive in how it would erode the fortunes of billionaires” and “would cut in half the wealth of the typical billionaire after 15 years, according to two economists who worked with the Sanders campaign on the plan.”
This time, Sanders wants to ensure that the billionaires who are fleeing California because the politics of jealousy in the state almost assure the passage of the proposed billionaire tax have nowhere to go to avoid the levy. He and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California have introduced a bill that imposes a 5% annual wealth tax on the country’s billionaires.
Like Robert Reich, the University of California, Berkeley professor and presidential economic adviser, Sanders and Khanna would be pleased to see billionaires driven into extinction.
There are not quite 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. Roughly 200 of them are still in California, even after the departures of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and others who don’t wish to have their earned wealth seized by greedy hands and redistributed politically. It would take a while to drive them all to extinction, but it’s obvious that Sanders and the others who play the politics of envy would sadistically enjoy a painfully drawn-out eradication.
Naturally, they stake out a position based on morality, but if they get their way, they will do deep harm to the country. An advanced economy that has no billionaires is an economy that is in decline. Any economy that loses even a portion of its billionaires will suffer similarly.
Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).
And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.
Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Just a simple example is Jimmy Carter with the “Yacht Tax”. It bothered him to see these ” oligaghts” sunning themselves on the decks. Ruined the boat building industry in US. Of course small minds like Bernie and Jimmy could not grasp how a wealthy person does not bury his wealth but rather puts it. to use either for production or pleasure, creating jobs and material goods.
As well as the aviation industry. Banning the Boeing SST was just the start.
I would ask the people who want to tax wealth “How many poor people do you know who have started a business and provided products or food?” I never got a job from a poor person.
It’s interesting to look up “ Countries Without Billionaires”. Not a single one of them that most folks would want to even visit.
Sadly, there are no politicians who follow and obey our tax law.
Exempt Income . org
I’m only going to say this one more time: The democrat party are like the “Good Fella’s” in the movie by the same name. What Bernie wants to do to “billionaires” and America is exactly what Fat Paulie, Henry and Tommy did to Sal’s restaurant.
They’ll bilk it for every penny they can get and when it all goes south…They Bust the Place Out! Set a fire! Burn it to the ground!
Well I think we should have a wealth tax on politicians. Being they all seem to amass fortunes outside the norm for their incomes. Something like 90% percent over 1million in in net worth.