Elizabeth Warren's tax guru explains how he will tax wealth, not income (f#cking scary)

New Yorker

The scariest part is where they talk non-stop about "wealth inequality" as if it is a factual, agreed upon problem.

Even the below headline mentions it as a factual problem to be solved, not as a something SOME people think is a problem.

quote:

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Gabriel Zucman and his colleagues are advocating a progressive wealth tax as a solution to global inequality, one that rethinks both evasion and the goals of taxation.

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Their solution is to tax assets and wealth. The below illustration shows that they would tax Warren Buffet based on the $3 billion his wealth increased this year (regardless of whether it is liquid, or even real and not just market fluctuations. Rather than on the $10 million of actual income he produced by selling some stocks.

They would likely tax his overall wealth as well.

I know that Warren Buffet is not a sympathetic character, but this is the entrance they are looking for to tax retirement funds and home equity.

quote:

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To explain how this could be, Zucman likes to use the example of Warren Buffett. Forbes had estimated Buffett’s wealth to be sixty billion dollars, which suggested that his wealth was growing by about three billion dollars per year. But Buffett reported to the I.R.S. capital gains of about ten million—based on his sales of some shares in his own company, Berkshire Hathaway. For many years, Buffett has been pointing out that his tax rate is too low—the line has often been that he pays a lower effective rate than his secretary—and urging politicians to turn the screws a bit tighter on the ultra-wealthy. In response, Barack Obama proposed the Buffett Rule, a principle adopted by Hillary Clinton, in which people making more than a million dollars a year would have a minimum federal tax rate of thirty per cent. As of a couple of years ago, this was the frontier of mainstream Democratic tax policy, but, to Zucman, it was outlandishly inadequate. Raising the rate on the ten million dollars that was accessible to the I.R.S. made no statistical difference at all. The issue was the $59,990,000,000 that they could not touch. Apply the Buffett Rule, don’t apply the Buffett Rule; it didn’t much matter. “Functionally, his tax rate is zero per cent,” Zucman said.

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