As the media continues to coalesce around Elizabeth Warren as the chosen candidate of the Left, Bernie Sanders has brought out the big guns to out-woke her. Warren may have a wealth tax, but now Bernie has released his extreme wealth tax.
No really — that’s the name. It’s Bernie’s “Extreme Wealth Tax.” Like Warren’s wealth tax, it’s likely unconstitutional and it won’t work. Pardon me — it extremely won’t work.
Targeting the top 0.1% of households, Bernie’s Extreme Wealth Tax would begin to tax net worth at $32 million and then tier upwards, with the top bracket taxing 8% on wealth over $10 billion. Bernie’s campaign claims that it’ll accrue $4.35 trillion. There are just two problems. First, the Constitution forbids direct taxation except in the case of the federal income tax. And second, even if the courts somehow allow the tax to go through, it won’t even come close to paying for the tens of trillions of dollars required to fund Sanders’ socialist fantasies.
Wealth taxes have categorically failed in every functional economy where they’ve ever been tried. Thanks to capital liquidity, wealth is far easier to conceal, divert, or send offshore than are transactions including the earning of income or the taking of capital gains. This is why nearly a dozen countries in Europe scrapped their wealth taxes after tens of thousands of millionaires fled their respective nations. Bernie’s estimation of the tax’s take is therefore surely very inflated.
But even if this weren’t an issue, Bernie’s Extreme Wealth Tax still wouldn’t make a dent in his growing Christmas list of government expansion. The conservative estimates of the costs of Bernie’s climate and energy nationalization plan, health care nationalization plan, and college tuition and debt cancellation are $16.3 trillion, $32.6 trillion, and $2.2 trillion respectively in their first decade alone. The wealth tax’s estimated take of $4.35 trillion is only 8.5% of $51.1 trillion, and that isn’t even the entirety of Bernie’s projected spending.
So we haven’t even reached socialism yet, and already we’ve run out of other people’s money.
