Elizabeth Warren says her wealth tax will "rebuild America's middle class." Amusingly enough, that's true! The reason the middle class has been shrinking is not because more people are becoming poor, but because more are becoming rich. Her tax will reverse that trend.
@paulg I know you are against it, but I personally have trouble arguing why a tax that kicks in at net worths over $50M impacts the above trend. A founder walking away with over $50M from a startup is an incredibly rare outcome, and I'm confused who would be discouraged as a result?
There are two modern examples (Germany and Korea) where people were in essentially the same starting position, but the country got split along an arbitrary line. One side went full government (communism), the other side went about half government. A few decades later, the standard of living in the fully government side was roughly 5 times lower. This gap widened further with time. A good test of which system is better is “who needs to build a wall to keep people in?” – that’s the bad one.
People never seem to consider that the people who make more than $50M are the ones who pay the salaries of the rest of the country (& most of the taxes, but that's a different problem). If they have to give more of their hard-earned money to our feckless, out-of-control government, they'll hire fewer people, they'll have less to reinvest in their own company & other's, etc. Giving more money to a government that no longer has effective checks & balances on their spending is not going to help anyone except the money laundering politicians.