Joe Biden had one job. He inherited a rapidly recovering economy and three approved vaccines for the novel coronavirus. All he had to do was sit back and watch his presidency succeed.
Instead, through inflationary overspending and radical anti-energy measures, he has slowed the recovery to a crawl. The price of gasoline is up 50% and third-quarter economic growth was a pathetic 2%. Biden now wants to make that even worse with still more overspending.
But Democrats keep providing reminders that, yes, it can always get worse.
The far Left now has its heart set on taking away not just the income but also the wealth of billionaires. It is a deeply stupid idea based on a form of class envy that most people just don’t feel.
Most people recognize that their lives are not at all made worse by the existence of billionaires — in fact, they create the billionaires in the first place, rewarding certain people’s innovations by purchasing their goods and services. Democratic politicians, on the other hand, seemingly ignorant of where their iPhones come from, use them to seethe and rage-tweet about those who are too financially independent for them to control completely.
This is why Democrats have graduated from double-taxing dead people through the inheritance tax to taxing live people for “income” they haven’t even earned yet.
In leftist Rep. Pramilla Jayapal’s mind, Elon Musk “made” $36 billion last week because his Tesla stock went up — never mind that he didn’t sell that stock and might not want to or be able to for many reasons unrelated to taxation (such as corporate governance).
Democrats cite the recent illegal IRS tax return leaks to ProPublica as justification for this policy. Those leaks showed that some billionaires pay relatively little in income taxes compared to their overall wealth. But any sense of injustice over this is misplaced. It is a fallacy that taxes should somehow correspond to wealth rather than annual income. A federal tax on “wealth growth” is both unconstitutional and impractical.
Income taxes have their downsides, but the reason they are attractive, reliable sources of revenue is that earners, by definition, bring in cash as the tax comes due. The compliance rate would be much, much lower, even among the wealthy, if people were constantly forced to liquidate assets in order to keep square with the government.
The practice of taxing gains as they are realized follows this reasoning. It also bows to the inconvenient reality that the market only truly decides the value of something, even of a stock, when it is sold, through the price that buyer and seller agree to. Large, forced stock transactions by billionaires to pay hundreds of millions in taxes on “gains” not yet taken would affect market prices. One cannot just sell such large amounts of stock at list price on TD Ameritrade.
And if a rich taxpayer wants to hold on to his appreciated stock — he has every right to, as it is his property — then it would be foolish and counterproductive to make him liquidate other assets, such as companies that employ thousands of people, just to satisfy a tax bill based on an arbitrary valuation of his so-called “tradable” assets.
Besides, the tax-dodging billionaire is a rarity. In reality, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code in the world. High-income earners pay nearly all personal income taxes and shoulder a far higher share of the tax burden than they take of total annual income. Democrats only complain because their definition of “democracy” entails that they get to “democratize,” that is, expropriate, wealth earned by other people so that they can waste it on failed social programs.
So if you’re worried on behalf of Big Government, please do not be. Billionaires pay tons in taxes, and they employ millions who pay even more in taxes. The taxes on billionaires’ capital gains do get paid eventually — just maybe not in time to make Joe Biden look like less of a fool for his current inflationary spending proposals.
