The left is really into this whole “eating the rich” concept. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both been suggesting that they can use a wealth tax to pay for all of their handouts. At least Andrew Yang paid for his stunt with voluntarily donated money.
These utopian promises are built on a whole stack of lies. Nothing about funding social programs with a wealth tax could possibly work.
Let’s start with the most obvious lie. Taxing the rich can’t pay for Bernie or Warren’s plans. The math doesn’t work.
If you taxed every billionaire in the United States at 100 percent, you would get less than $2 trillion. That’s not enough to pay for even a single year of Medicare for all, and that’s not a tax you can do twice, much less yearly. There is not enough money in the hands of the rich for these wealth taxes to do what the politicians claim they’ll do.
That’s all to say nothing of the myriad of problems that come with a wealth tax. Forcing billionaires to liquidate assets will artificially devalue those assets. Simply passing a wealth tax will make the wealthy worth less, and that lowers the tax revenue before you even collect it. The whole thing is crazy and stupid.
There are plenty of other serious, practical problems with a wealth tax, and you’ll find them in this video.
