Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman sent a critical letter to Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren pushing back against her wealth tax plan, alleging that she is vilifying capitalism and the rich.
Cooperman sent the letter, made public by CNBC, as a response to a tweet Warren put out on Oct. 23 criticizing him. He said Warren’s criticism of entrepreneurial billionaires such as himself was unfair and would squelch the American dream. He felt a need to respond in part because Warren’s tweet admonished him like “a parent chiding an ungrateful child.”
“For you to suggest that capitalism is a dirty word and these people, as a group [billionaire entrepreneurs], are ingrates who didn’t earn their riches, through strenuous effort and (in many cases) paradigm-shifting insights, and now don’t pull their weight societally indicates you either are grossly uninformed or are knowingly warping the facts for narrow political gain,” Cooperman said in the letter.
He also challenged some of the assumptions that Warren’s outside economic advisers, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, used to create Warren’s wealth tax plan.
“In sum, Saez and Zucman’s economic model appears to be based on highly dubious assumptions and tailored to promote a specific ‘progressive’ policy agenda, and their conclusions are far less definitive and unequivocal than they maintain,” he wrote.
Cooperman said the individual income tax system is already very liberal and that “the wealthy should pay more than those of lesser means, but they already do,” suggesting Warren’s wealth tax plan was confiscatory.
He ended the letter by saying he is a registered independent and that Warren and he should work together to “find common ground in this vital conversation – not firing off snarky tweets that stir your base the expense of accuracy.”
[Related: Andrew Yang bashes Elizabeth Warren wealth tax, arguing it didn’t work in Europe]
