[OFFICIAL] Elizabeth Warren for President thread

NewRoxFan · Jan 22, 2019

Senator said: ↑

Warren has some very, very good social policies. The best I've seen from the democrats... ever, in terms of being a champion of the 99% without being a socialist.

A Beto Warren combination would be the democrats best bet, with Beto the spokesman and Warren the behind the scenes VP to pursuade fringe voters and those that swung over to Trump in 2016. Forget about the trash like Hilary, AOC and whoever else are the Palin's of the left, go to core and work at getting the trust of the American worker back who are getting hurt with Trump (3.2 million farmers today).
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An interesting pairing. I will admit while I really respect Warren I prefer more centrist candidates. Though a VP can have two roles... likable, agreeable, works well with congress, or "tough", "attack-oriented", bad cop to the President's "good cop" (especially during the campaign). Warrens years of experience would be invaluable to a newbie like O'Rourke. As would her east coast liberalism.

Me... Id rather be a the chairman of the Senate Banking committee. Or maybe the Secretary of the Treasury. To be honest, I'd really like Biden as VP candidate. A Klobuchar/Biden ticket would be interesting.

Os Trigonum · Jan 23, 2019

Althouse on why "Elizabeth Warren's 2004 book 'The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke' might hurt her with feminists."

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/01/elizabeth-warrens-2004-book-two-income.html

discussing this article in Vox:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book

Os Trigonum · Jan 24, 2019

Warren proposes a "wealth tax" on folks with over $50 million in assets. As reported in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...ricans-economist-says/?utm_term=.e7f99bd093b0

and summarized at Fortune: http://fortune.com/2019/01/24/warren-wealth-tax/

FranchiseBlade · Jan 24, 2019

That is probably a way of getting around changing the top income rate and those that pay less because of capital gains. Sounds pretty good.

juicystream · Jan 24, 2019

Os Trigonum said: ↑

Warren proposes a "wealth tax" on folks with over $50 million in assets. As reported in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...ricans-economist-says/?utm_term=.e7f99bd093b0

and summarized at Fortune: http://fortune.com/2019/01/24/warren-wealth-tax/
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Interesting idea. Hard to implement though. Valuations fluctuate greatly. Publicly traded assets aren't an issue, but private companies and property?

Redfish81 · Jan 24, 2019

A wealth tax has long been considered unconstitutional. Considereing the makeup of the Supreme Court, it would likley require a Constitutional Amendment to be enacted.

Higher income tax rates are much easier to accomplish in the near future.

Os Trigonum · Jan 25, 2019

Richard Rubin's piece on Warren's proposal in today's WSJ.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democr...rich-households-11548369037?mod=hp_listb_pos1

Democrat Elizabeth Warren Proposes Wealth Tax on Rich Households
The plan drives the tax-policy discussions within the Democratic Party further to the left

By Richard Rubin
Updated Jan. 24, 2019 9:02 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is proposing an annual wealth tax, attempting to combat inequality and raise trillions of dollars with a significant new levy on the very richest Americans.

Ms. Warren’s proposal would impose a 2% annual tax on household wealth above $50 million and an additional 1% tax on wealth above $1 billion. The tax would affect about 75,000 households and raise $2.75 trillion over a decade, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who analyzed the plan for the Massachusetts senator.

That is roughly 10 times the revenue that the current estate and gift taxes are projected to raise, but Ms. Warren’s “ultramillionaire-tax” proposal on the top 0.1% isn’t just about generating money to pay for government programs. It marks Democrats’ intense emphasis on inequality as the party tries to reclaim the White House in 2020.

The wealth-tax proposal drives the tax-policy conversation within the Democratic Party further to the left. Two progressive groups—the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy—released papers on wealth taxes this week.

The discussions are moving beyond the Obama-era tax proposals that never became law, such as additional taxes on high-income business owners and a plan to tax unrealized capital gains at death. Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), who is also running for president, is pitching a refundable tax credit worth up to $500 per household a month. And freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) has drawn attention with her calls for a 70% top marginal income-tax rate on income above $10 million, up from today’s 37% rate, which starts at a much lower level.

Ms. Warren said the money could be used for child care, relief of student-loan debt, environmental initiatives or health care. She described the tax as a matter of basic fairness, pushing back against a system tilted in favor of concentrated wealth.

“It gives somebody else in this economy a chance,” she said on MSNBC Thursday night. “When we’re only taxing income, we’re taxing two people who may have the same income but are in wildly different economic circumstances.”

The U.S. has a form of wealth tax in the estate tax, but it has nothing like the annual tax outlined in the proposal.

Under current law, wealthy Americans who hold on to their assets without selling them don’t have to pay income taxes on the gains during their lifetimes. Their estates pay a tax of up to 40% when they die, though many can minimize or avoid that tax, too. Heirs have to pay income taxes only when they sell assets and only on the gains since the prior holder’s death.

An annual wealth tax, by contrast, would apply regardless of whether those affected saw their fortunes rise or fall and regardless of whether they sold assets during the year.

People who start successful companies and have billions of dollars in stock in them can minimize income taxes during their lifetimes. They avoid stock sales and borrow against their assets.

The issue, to Democrats today, isn’t just the tax rate that applies to high-income households. The issue also encompasses what gets taxed in the first place.

“The people at the very, very top get a lot of their income never included in the system,” said David Kamin, a New York University law professor who was a tax-policy aide to President Barack Obama. “You can have very vast wealth without paying a lot of tax relative to it.”

Mr. Kamin said he had discussed the idea of a wealth tax with Ms. Warren’s office.

A wealth tax faces political, legal and practical obstacles. Unlike estate and income-tax plans, wealth taxes don’t have a long track record of support in Congress, even among Democrats. Wealthy taxpayers would begin looking for ways to escape or avoid the tax, and there would be frequent disputes about the value of illiquid assets such as businesses, real estate and art. And taxpayers would consider constitutional challenges, pointing to the limits on so-called direct taxation.

“The Warren proposal may be good politics in a soon-to-be crowded Democrat primary field, but it is always bad economics and would never earn the backing of 60 of the senator’s colleagues,” said Alex Brill, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. It would likely create “massive compliance burdens,” he added.

Ms. Warren’s proposal would let taxpayers defer payment with interest for up to five years. She would also seek more money for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce the tax, require minimum audit rates for the wealth tax and create new ways for the government to get information about Americans’ assets.

She would also create a 40% exit tax on assets above $50 million for people who renounce their citizenship.

Write to Richard Rubin at richard.rubin@wsj.com
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dachuda86 · Jan 25, 2019

Tax the rich too much and watch them move. Happened in France.

Os Trigonum · Jan 25, 2019

dachuda86 said: ↑

Tax the rich too much and watch them move. Happened in France.
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appears to have happened in New Jersey

https://observer.com/2019/01/nj-politics-digest-thousands-of-millionaires-fled-the-area-in-2018/

Os Trigonum · Jan 25, 2019

Redfish81 said: ↑

A wealth tax has long been considered unconstitutional. Considereing the makeup of the Supreme Court, it would likley require a Constitutional Amendment to be enacted.

Higher income tax rates are much easier to accomplish in the near future.
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A brief comment from Dave Schuler that echoes your point about the constitutional questions and predicts other undesirable effects.

http://theglitteringeye.com/warrens-tax-proposal/

Senator · Jan 26, 2019

Os Trigonum said: ↑

Warren proposes a "wealth tax" on folks with over $50 million in assets. As reported in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...ricans-economist-says/?utm_term=.e7f99bd093b0

and summarized at Fortune: http://fortune.com/2019/01/24/warren-wealth-tax/
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One of many sharp and realistic proposals by Warren.

It's telling that libs obsessed with reality tv prefer to talk about aoc over Warren, the person who would actually help the 99%. Do aoc fans just need a gf?

ApolloRLB · Jan 26, 2019

Redfish81 said: ↑

A wealth tax has long been considered unconstitutional. Considereing the makeup of the Supreme Court, it would likley require a Constitutional Amendment to be enacted.

Higher income tax rates are much easier to accomplish in the near future.
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And reversing the estate tax repeal with a much more aggressive sliding scale/loop hole elimination as you go up in inheritance.

Os Trigonum · Jan 26, 2019

Kevin Williamson argues "Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she’s proposing asset forfeiture."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-tax-plan-is-asset-forfeiture/

dobro1229 · Jan 26, 2019

Awww poor millionaires and billionaires. Life is so hard.

At least liberals are becoming less and less afraid to have an honest discussion about Redistribution of wealth. When they’ve skirted around this issue for decades out of fear of the right wing media saying “they want to raise YOUR taxes”, they played right into the hands of the right who wants to make the Dems avoid this topic altogether.

Like the majority of Americans who were recently polled by Fox, I support AOC’s proposal for her 70% tax on people making over 10 million in a year. I need to read up on Warrens proposal and see if it also makes sense.

I won’t shed a tear for the poor and abused 1%. When I get to 9 Million myself I’ll call you.

Os Trigonum · Jan 28, 2019

on the unconstitutionality of Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-warrens-unconstitutional-wealth-tax-11548442306

Elizabeth Warren’s Unconstitutional Wealth Tax
If you thought the Native American story was a whopper, check out her new plan to expand government.
1324 Comments
By James Freeman
Jan. 25, 2019 1:51 p.m. ET

As she seeks the 2020 presidential nomination of the Democratic party, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is giving voters fair warning that she does not accept the Constitution’s limits on federal power. On Thursday the former Harvard law professor unveiled a plan to extract wealth from the country’s wealthiest citizens. According to a press release from her Senate office:

United States Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) today unveiled the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, a bold proposal to tax the wealth of the richest 0.1% of Americans. The legislation, which applies only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more, is estimated by leading economists to raise $2.75 trillion in tax revenue over a ten-year period.

For decades, a small group of families has raked in a massive amount of the wealth American workers have produced, while America’s middle class has been hollowed out. The result is an extreme concentration of wealth not seen in any other leading economy.
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The “leading economists” cited by Team Warren are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California-Berkeley. Readers may recognize Mr. Saez as the sometime research partner of Thomas Piketty. Economists on both the right and the left have lately been poking holes in the Saez/Piketty research which purported to show a dramatic increase in levels of income inequality.

No doubt many economists will also explain in the days to come why the Warren tax would not raise as much as Messrs. Saez and Zucman expect and how it would distort investment and encourage capital flight from the United States. Ms. Warren implicitly acknowledges this last problem. Her plan includes “a significant increase in the IRS enforcement budget” and “a 40% ‘exit tax’ on the net worth above $50 million of any U.S. citizen who renounces their citizenship.”

For now, Ms. Warren is saying she will only confiscate a small percentage of wealth from the very richest Americans:

2% annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion

1% annual Billionaire Surtax (3% tax overall) on household net worth above $1 billion
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There are excellent economic arguments against this new tax plan. But today this column would like to focus on the illegality of the Warren scheme. Ms. Warren seems to understand this problem as well. Typically lawmakers announcing new legislation don’t feel the need to simultaneously try to rebut anticipated claims that the bill is unconstitutional. But the Warren press release links to two letters on the subject, each signed by various law professors at famous universities.

No matter how many academics she persuades to sign on to this ideological project, the plain fact is that the founders specifically prohibited such a tax. A well-informed reader notes:

The 16th Amendment authorizes Congress to tax “incomes, from whatever source derived.” It does not give Congress the power to tax balance sheets as well.

At the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris explained in plain English what every delegate understood “direct taxation” to be: it is when the federal government attempts to “stretch its hand directly into the pockets of the people,” rather than acting through the intermediary of a state. Direct taxes, the delegates decided, would be authorized only if each state paid the same per capita amount – i.e., only if the taxes were apportioned to population. Warren’s proposal to stretch her hand directly into the pockets of the people would not be apportioned and so it would violate both the 16th Amendment (failing as an income tax) and Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 (failing because it is an unapportioned direct tax).

In NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice Roberts got this point wrong and held that the Obamacare tax is not a direct tax... Notwithstanding Roberts’s obviously hasty and slipshod analysis (it’s all of a page), the facts of that case are unique (he claimed the tax was not on people or property but rather “it is triggered by specific circumstances.”) Warren’s tax is quite obviously a tax on property, which the courts have repeatedly held constitutes a direct tax.

Warren might want to characterize her wealth tax as an “excise tax,” since such taxes were held constitutional before the adoption of the 16th Amendment. But an excise tax is levied on a specific transaction or a specific activity (e.g., gambling; using a truck on a highway). Will she claim the excise tax is for the privilege of living in America as a rich person?
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Perhaps the plan is for President Warren to take to twitter and cyberbully John Roberts into signing off on another unconstitutional tax claim. If so, she’s not even giving him a pretext to pretend this is legal. As for the pro-Warren law professors, one letter offers nothing but an appeal to the authority of their own interpretation and belief. It reads in part:

Constitutional text and history demonstrate that “direct” tax is best interpreted as a narrow category that would not include a net worth tax. Because your proposal falls squarely within Congress’ broad taxing power and does not require apportionment, we believe it is constitutional.
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The other group of famous law profs appeals to the authority of a 1900 precedent, Knowlton v. Moore. The Warrenistas write:

... Knowlton confronted an inheritance tax that directly hit the property itself. Like your proposal, this wealth tax was progressive, increasing the rate from .75% to 3% as inherited property increased in value from $10,000 to $1 million. Nevertheless, the Court unanimously held that the tax was “indirect.” With only one dissent, it upheld its progressive formula against the claim that its increasing tax on the rich was a violation of the requirement of national “uniformity” imposed by Article one.
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The lefty profs can cheer about “progressive” tax policies, but the Knowlton decision recognized that death taxes, generally known as “death duties” back then, were taxes on a specific event or transaction, and therefore not the same as a direct tax on a person’s wealth:

That death duties, generally, have been from the beginning in all countries considered as different from taxes levied on property, real or personal, directly on account of the ownership and possession thereof, is demonstrated by the review which we have previously made. It has also been established by what we have heretofore said, that such taxes, almost from the beginning of our national life, have been treated as duties, and not as direct taxes.
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Voters can choose to believe that Ms. Warren’s wealth tax would only hit those with enormous wealth. But given the damage she intends to wreak on constitutional limited government, why should they?
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NewRoxFan · Jan 28, 2019

Os Trigonum said: ↑

on the unconstitutionality of Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-warrens-unconstitutional-wealth-tax-11548442306
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Hey wait... is it a "tax the wealthy" plan, a "income redistribution" plan, or a "grow government"plan? I got to know which republican talking point to use...

Os Trigonum · Jan 28, 2019

NewRoxFan said: ↑

Hey wait... is it a "tax the wealthy" plan, a "income redistribution" plan, or a "grow government"plan? I got to know which republican talking point to use...
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your question was about a Democratic party "veering sharply to the left." There's plenty of evidence, dating back to Bernie's popularity several years ago and others currently picking up the Bernie flag and running with it. Not sure why that's hard to see.

NewRoxFan · Jan 28, 2019

Os Trigonum said: ↑

your question was about a Democratic party "veering sharply to the left." There's plenty of evidence, dating back to Bernie's popularity several years ago and others currently picking up the Bernie flag and running with it. Not sure why that's hard to see.
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Since I am not a Bernie fan. I wouldn't vote for him, didn't vote for him (and neither did most Democrats), won't vote for him (and just as likely most Democrats won't in 2020). Like I said... get back to me when the candidate is chosen, and when the official policy statements come out, and when campaign planks get communicated.

meanwhile... I will worry about how the republican party has swung even further right. There's this guy named steve king I keep hearing about...

Os Trigonum · Jan 29, 2019

Liz is for the little people

Senator · Jan 30, 2019

Os Trigonum said: ↑

Liz is for the little people

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Nice, warren is spot on here.

All the wealthy have to do is pay tax and social problems plaguing the low increase me or even slower members of society, some of them on here, will reduce two to threefold.

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