Sen. Sanders proposes new wealth tax, claims billionaires should not exist – By OAN Newsroom (OANN) / Sept 24 2019
2020 candidate Bernie Sanders is proposing a controversial new wealth tax, which goes even further than the plan pushed by his chief rival Elizabeth Warren. Sanders tweeted a link to his proposal Tuesday with the caption “there should be no billionaires.”
There should be no billionaires. We are going to tax their extreme wealth and invest in working people. Read the plan: https://t.co/RJDLvX5H4c
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 24, 2019
The new tax rates would apply to those with a net worth above $32 million, and would reportedly raise over $4 trillion within a decade. The money would go toward funding Sanders social programs such as Medicare for All and universal child care. The Vermont senator even suggested creating a “national wealth registry” to make sure everyone singled out by the wealth tax pays.
The Sanders campaign has even touted how the plan would cut in half the wealth of billionaires over the next 15 years. The underlying premise used by the democratic socialist to support this confiscation scheme is the belief that income inequality is a moral failing that only the government can fix. What Sanders fails to take into account is that America has long been a powerhouse of innovation and wealth creation on the world stage precisely because of our basis in free market capitalism.
As the late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman has explained, taking from the rich only hurts hardworking Americans and stunts economic growth.
“The harm in that is where do you get the factories, where do you get the machines, where do you get the capital investment, where do you get the incentive to improve technology?” asked Friedman.
In fact, economic mobility is the foundation of the American dream. While Sanders would like voters to believe that the “poor get poorer and the rich get richer,” in reality all households are better off now than ever before.
A report this month from the Cato Institute found that the middle class is shrinking because more people are moving into the upper class. Data from the Census Bureau shows the number of households earning over $100,000 has tripled since the late 1960s to over 30-percent, and the number of households making below $50,000 is now the lowest on record at less than 40-percent.
https://www.oann.com/sen-sanders-proposes-new-wealth-tax-claims-billionaires-should-not-exist/
