If you ever wished you could be counted among billionaires, your wish might come true soon if the socialists get their way. Of course, its not that youll have a billion-dollar net worth, but rather youll be subject to the same wealth tax that progressives say they want to foist onto billionaires.
What Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky said of war applies to the wealth tax: you may not care about it, but it cares about you. Recently, California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna published his own personal manifesto, “Why I Support a Billionaire Wealth Tax.” But he quickly pulled the mask back even further, revealing the true targets of his tax scheme.
Khanna started arguing to tax billionaires, then halfway through the manifesto decided it should be centimillionaires â $100-million net worth. By the end, he was going after for $50-million-aires. At that rate, give it a year or two, and the wealth tax will be $50 thousand, not $50 million.
This wouldnt be the first time progressives pulled this kind of bait and switch â its what they did with the income tax. Billionaires are the cheese in the mousetrap, a marketing prop to pass the tax before going after the real target. Once the tax is in place, the communists can get to work knocking zeros off the threshold until it hits pretty much anybody with a job or savings or a home.
This just happened in New York. Comrade Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist mayor, campaigned on enacting new taxes for billionaires, but he’s already pushing tax hikes on millionaires.
Again, this is nothing new. Its the same play progressives ran with the income tax. It was just a tax on the rich, they promised at the time â for annual incomes equivalent to $15 million today. Back in 1908, Democrat nominee William Jennings Bryan called for taxing “swollen fortunes” of men of large incomes, so that, as the platform explained, “wealth may bear its proportionate share of the burdens of government.”
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Of course, the rich were the bait to get the middle class into the trap. Today, the income tax hits two-thirds of Americans, starting at $15,000, not $15 million. So much for swollen fortunes.
Meanwhile, the tax that started at a rate of 1% to 7% on millionaires now hits the middle class at a 35% marginal rate. Throw in additional taxes on income for Social Security, Medicare and state income tax, and the marginal rate is 50% in places like California.
Thats just the dollars that people lose. It doesnt include the billions of hours Americans spend in an annual month-long humiliation ritual, financial colonoscopy, under threat of audit and imprisonment.
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So, it’s nice of progressives to spring the trap early by already removing zeros from the original target of their wealth tax. But even if the tax were limited to billionaires, wealth taxes are catastro
