Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I get rather irked when rich people endorse higher taxes.
Are they trying to curry favor with politicians? Seeking some sort of favoritism from Washington (like Warren Buffett)?
Or do they genuinely think it’s a good idea to voluntarily send extra cash to the clowns in D.C. ?
I’m not sure how Bill Gates should be classified, but the billionaire is sympathetic to a wealth tax according to news reports.
Bill Gates…says he’d be ok with a tax on his assets. In an interview with Bloomberg, Gates was asked if he would support a wealth tax… Gates said he wouldn’t be opposed to such a measure… “I doubt, you know, the U.S. will do a wealth tax,
but I wouldn’t be against it,” he said. …This isn’t the first time Gates has hinted at supporting a wealth tax, an idea being pushed by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). In February, Gates told The Verge that tax plans solely focused on income are “missing the picture,” suggesting the estate tax and taxes on capital should instead be the subject of more progressive rates.
My reaction is that Gates should lead by example.
A quick web search indicates that Gates is worth $105 billion.
Based on Warren’s proposal for a 3 percent tax on all assets about $1 billion, Gates should put his money where his mouth is and send a $3.12 billion check to Washington.
Or, if Gates really wanted to show his “patriotism,” he could pay back taxes on his fortune.
CNBC helpfully did the calculations.
A recent paper by two economists who helped Warren create her plan — University of California, Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — calculated what effect Warren’s plan would have had on America’s richest, including Gates,
if it had been imposed starting in 1982 (the first year Forbes magazine began tracking the net worth of the 400 richest Americans) through 2018. Gates, whose fortune was tallied at $97 billion on 2018′s Forbes 400 list, would have been worth nearly two-thirds less last year — a total of only $36.4 billion — had Warren’s plan been in place for the last three decades. Gates’ current net worth is $105.3 billion, according to Forbes.
In other words, Gates could show he’s not a hypocrite by sending a check for more than $60 billion to Uncle Sam.
Because I’m a helpful guy, I’ll even direct him to the website that the federal government maintains
for the knaves and fools who think people like Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi should have extra money to squander (my two cents is that they’re the ones with the worst incentive to use money wisely).
Needless to say, Gates won’t give extra money to Washington.
Just like he won’t fire the dozens (if not hundreds) of financial advisors that he surely employs to protect his income and assets from the IRS.
The bottom line is that nobody who embraces higher taxes should be taken seriously unless they show us that they’re willing to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
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Image credit: Kuhlmann /MSC | CC BY 3.0 DE.
