Elizabeth "Make That a Giveaway and Tax the Rich" Warren

 Elizabeth Warren

How mad is Elizabeth Warren's buy the votes plan?

Pretty much over the top.


According to the Washington Post:

Since launching her presidential campaign, Warren has rolled out a domestic platform that, so far, her campaign estimates would cost a combined $3 trillion over 10 years — plans that include canceling student debt for almost every American, building 3 million affordable housing units, reducing rents by 10 percent nationwide, shrinking the black-white wealth gap by 4 percentage points, subsidizing child-care for all young families, offering universal prekindergarten, providing universal opioid treatment and eliminating the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog while making all national parks free.

She wants to pay for the giveaways by taxing the assets of the super-rich:

The centerpiece of Warren’s agenda is a 2 percent annual tax on household assets above $50 million, hitting the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans...The crowd broke into cheers several times as Warren described how a 2 percent tax on “the diamonds, the yachts and the Rembrandts” of multimillionaires would pay for a host of new social programs — including a $100 billion plan to combat the opioid epidemic.

In conjunction with a proposed  $1 trillion corporate tax on the most profitable companies, Warren’s campaign says that the wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. The two combined the campaign says would be enough to cover her spending plans with hundreds of billions of dollars to spare. 

But there is a problem (aside from taxing the productive).

In a Washington Post op-ed last month, former Obama administration economic adviser Lawrence Summers and University of Pennsylvania professor Natasha Sarin wrote that “such a wealth tax will not yield the revenue that its proponents hope for,” citing figures from the current estate tax that show how the wealthy have proved adept in avoiding the 40 percent levy on their assets after death.

“The problem with their estimate is that they fail to engage with the fact that wealthy people do a lot of things that make it very hard to tax their estates, and will make it equally hard to tax their wealth,” said Sarin, who teaches finance at the Wharton School of Business.


A recent poll of about 40 top economists by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found that 73 percent.

Wealth taxes in the world’s richest nations have brought in far less revenue than expected as a result of tax avoidance, according to a 2018 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

On top of that, the plan would certainly face legal challenges notes The Post. 

Warren declined a request by The Post to comment but she continues to push her unbalanced central planning scheme on the campaign trail.

The Post explains:

Even as economists debate the feasibility of an “ultra-millionaires tax,” Warren has found it to be an effective political weapon on the stump... 

Her plan offers an aggressive path to shrinking the wealth gap and has proved popular among broad swaths of the public.

A February Politico-Morning Consult poll found that 61 percent of voters supported the wealth tax, while 20 percent oppose it. Among Republicans, 50 percent supported it and 30 percent were opposed.

And here is the understatement of the presidential campaign so far. The Post writes:

Some of the plans Warren has described in detail would create massive new entitlements, with the risk of overshooting budget estimates.

-RW