Elizabeth Warren 2020 campaign megathread

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So is that Burkman press conference actually happening?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Anyone see this poll? https://www.msubillings.edu/cas/nams/polls/2019%20Mountain%20States%20Poll%20Report.pdf

Warren 82 - Biden 0 (WY)

Yeah, it was a poll of 14 people. Yes, literally 14.

Not something that could be considered scientific by any reasonable measure. Maybe the people they asked were all in the same family?

A survey of 14 people has a MoE of 26%.  So when you get 82% in a randomly sampled poll of 14 people, you can still be pretty damn confident you have a clear majority of the population. (I have no idea if this poll had a random sample though.)

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Warren's own McKinsey guy thinks MATH means she's gonna win
https://twitter.com/mishaley/status/1169269150923010048

extremely Atlas thread, encourage you to read it in full

I think I agree with much of the substance of this. But the author is blatantly plagiarizing Steven Skowronek without attribution.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

The IRS can indeed go after rich tax cheats.  Under the Trump administration, they have deliberately changed their priorities away from auditing wealthy people and toward auditing poor people.  This is something that can be changed with by executive order without any need of Congress.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It's funny seeing centrists like Bill Nelson rip Warren and Bernie like they didn't lose last year.

*pssst*

Andrew Gillum ran on a progressive platform and lost worse than Nelson did

And Andy Beshear ran on a fairly liberal platform (at least for most red state Dems) and won in Kentucky. Your point?

I saw lots of people trying to SHUT UP, CENTRIST Nelson on this one, but it's a pretty tough sell to say that Nelson lost because he was insufficiently progressive.

Maybe that wasn't the point of your post. If it wasn't, then I apologize, but it sure seemed like that was (and is) the angle you're driving at.

Maybe not too centrist exactly, but he almost certainly lost because he was not sufficiently attentive to the concerns of ethnic minorities in his state.  Which is not really a charge that could be brought against the other Senate Dems that lost.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

The painting for that year would be valued at your purchase price, every other year it would be taxed at the appraised value based on the IRS criteria. A crypto currency or stock would have a designated period like December 31st and the value that day would be the assigned value. Switzerland which has a wealth tax does something like this.

 So lets say the bulk of your fortune was ownership of 1 million shares of Company X and the share price was $60. You would owe $200,000 in wealth tax.

OK, so the IRS is going to come up with appraisal criteria for paintings?  Isn't it already complicated enough they have to do it for real estate to assess property taxes.  Now they are going to have to appraise EVERYTHING in order to properly calculate someone's wealth.

How about race horses?  In 2000, Fugalchi Pegasus sold for $70,000,000.  If I had $100M and spent $70M of that on Pegasus, but then he became infertile, what's my wealth, what do I owe?

It may seem like a silly example, but if you DON'T bother to assess the value, or include a race horse in my wealth calculations, suddenly the market for expensive horses will explode as the very wealthy look for a place to shelter their wealth and avoid the 2% annual tax.

And this could be true of literally any expensive thing.  If the government decides it doesn't know how to properly value {thing}, suddenly everyone will be buying {thing} they can park their wealth in.

But all this is kind of tangential to my main point, which is that Warren is misleading people by pretending this tax would be insubstantial.  The reason people would want to hide their money in a racehorse is because her wealth tax is going to HAMMER people's fortunes in the long run.

And I looked it up, apparently she does want to do 6% on wealth over $1B!  So in 20 years, Bill Gates will have lost $80B of his $110B fortune.  That is INSANE.

The number of people who own >$50,000,000 worth of racehorses or paintings is so small that it's not worth considering in a policy discussion.  The overwhelming majority of people who are this wealthy own almost all their wealth in equities or properties whose value is publicly available.  If there's someone out there who owns a Triple Crown Winner and no other significant wealth, I don't care whether or not he evades the tax.

Even if you somehow think that Bill Gates having only $30 billion is a hardship, this is only true if Gates made no additional income or return on his wealth over the next 20 years.  The vast majority of billionaires have seen their wealth increase at a rate much greater than 6% per year over the past few decades.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Most people find it unjust to take all of a billionaire's money.    

No one is suggesting taking -all- of a billionaire's money.   That's the strawman argument here.  The 6% wealth tax would only apply to wealth -over- $1 billion dollars.  Not all of it.  The billionaire is still going to be a billionaire.

Even if a 6% wealth tax applied to -every dollar- of a $110 billion fortune, it would take well over 200 year to reduce that below $1 billion (again assuming the billionaire made no additional money during that 200 years).

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Again, just because someone has a net worth of $150 billion doesn't mean they HAVE $150 billion. Most of that wealth is just on paper.

What do you mean "just on paper"?  Of course they don't have a huge Scrooge McDuck vault filled with gold coins.  Most of their wealth is in stocks and other equities which are pretty liquid (i.e. they could easily be sold).

The total net worth of every billionaire in America is $2.9 trillion. If the government seized 100% of those assets and liquidated them somehow, it would fund the federal government for 8 months.

You're right that relative to the long-term budget of the US government, you can't raise significant money from billionaires alone.  That's why the wealth tax hits accumulations over $50 million, which is still extraordinary wealth and also includes a much larger number of individuals.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Norway, Iceland, and Sweden, places people like you want America to be like, all have significantly more billionaires per capita than the US. There is actually a strong correlation between # of billionaires per capita and high HDI/low poverty rates.

Also, Iceland has one billionaire worth just under $2 billion, so this is a pretty silly example.  Seven of the world's 10 richest people are American (excluding royalty).  If you are just thinking per capita, the countries with the greatest ratio of billionaires are Hong Kong and Singapore, and I can't imagine we want American government to model after them.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Warren's wealth tax, as a recurring tax on a single fortune, is designed to eliminate wealth entirely.

You don’t think having $1 billion constitutes “wealth”?  Even if the tax were 100% of all wealth over $1 billion, that would still leave billionaires with $1 billion.  Which to me sounds like a whole of wealth.  And thus it wouldn’t be eliminating wealth entirely.

  It would be analogous to "you only need $70,000, so whether you make $100,000 or $150,000 or $500,000 I'm going to take all your money to make sure you only have $70,000.  And you have no right to complain because I know what's best for you and I say $70,000 is all you need."

It’s not analogous to this because having $70,000 is not analogous to have $1 billion.