The Billionaires Income Tax
If being a billionaire was just about good investing we wouldn’t be talking about a tax on billionaires.
Just a few days ago, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced a tax plan that he’s been working on for years. It’s deep, it’s complicated and it already has a simple name, “The Billionaires Income Tax”. The tax is estimated to hit about 700 people, which is a bit shy of the number of billionaires in America. And through some fortuitous timing, this is a tax that Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) can totally get behind.
Politico goes into some of the details of the proposed tax here. It doesn’t have a score in Congress yet, but already some Democrats are backing away from it. Wyden estimates the proposed tax would bring in several hundred billion a year, and that it would help to pay for the Build Back Better plan proposed by Joe Biden and fellow Democrats.
I understand the liberal desire to tax wealth, but I believe that by the time you get around to taxing wealth, you’re too late. True, unbridled wealth is acquired through the magic of contracts that are enforced by government intervention in the market. In a civilized society when someone breaches a contract, the other parties to the contract sue for relief — they don’t hire hitmen. We want to keep things civil.
