Democrats and the politics of envy
By Dr. Harold A. Black
blackh@knoxfocus.com
haroldblackphd.com
Kamala Harris ran ads as the “candidate of change” promising a “new way forward.” She apparently forgot that she was Joe Biden’s vice president. Did this mean she was going to change Biden’s policies? Apparently not since her policies were to the left of Biden’s. So she was lying. Since the majority of voters said the country was heading in the wrong direction, she thought the electorate must have amnesia. That the voters rejected Harris confirmed that you cannot fool all the people all the time. However, 74 million people voted for her and confirmed that you can fool some of the people some of the time.
Harris did not resonate with the voters. She neither came through as genuine or authentic. Her inability to directly answer questions. Her not having a single press conference and her word salads did not inspire confidence that she could handle the job of being president.
She is Jamaican-Indian-American. After listening to her ads a friend of mine said that Harris “speaks with a forked tongue.”
Although Harris was a child of privilege, she tried to play the envy card. My father used to tell us that envy was a wasted emotion. He would say “Never be envious of others. Make others envious of you.” Obviously, Dad was not a Democrat because at every election Democrats play the envy card. The ad I saw most often said that Trump was for billionaires while Harris was “for you.” It said that she will make billionaires “pay their fair share” – whatever that is. Obviously, the Democrats think that voters are fools. Didn’t they think that voters would notice that Mark Cuban who served as Harris’ translator was a billionaire? Didn’t they realize that voters saw that Bill Gates gave the Harris campaign $50 million? What about all the celebrity endorsements from billionaires in the entertainment industry and the sports world? Notice to the Democrats: the politics of envy is not working. It always amazes me that the billionaire Democrats continue to let their party play the envy card.
But what is the rich’s fair share? Let us suppose that their fair share is the max tax bracket of 37%. One problem is that some billionaires have very little income. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet have a salary of about $100,000 a year which puts them in the 22% tax bracket. This is where Biden’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains comes in. Most billionaires including the Democrat ones oppose such a tax. Even Mark Cuban was against the tax. Also how do you treat unrealized capital losses? Last year Elon Musk “lost” $24 billion when Tesla stock fell 9%. Does this mean that Musk who now is “only” worth $232 billion would get a tax refund?
What about Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax? She wants a 2% tax on every dollar of net worth over $50 million and an additional 1% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion. Instead of impacting just the 500 or so billionaires in the country, it would affect over 75,000 households. Some European countries instituted such a tax and it has been a flop. In France, before Macron killed it, 42,000 millionaires left the country. As a result, wealth taxes raise less revenue than anticipated. Warren’s proposal would tax people regardless of where they lived. If they were to change citizenship it would levy an exit tax of 40 percent of wealth over $50 million. The government would have to estimate yearly the market value of all of a person’s assets. The high administrative costs of such a task caused Austria to end their tax.
I have a modest suggestion. Let the Democrat billionaires lead by example. Let them donate 2% of every dollar of their net worth over $50 million and 1% of every dollar of net worth over $1 billion. So, Bill Gates, Cuban, Zuckerburg, Bloomberg, Soros, Steyer, Jobs, Benioff, Pritzker, Schultz (Starbucks), Gray (Blackstone), Hoffman (LinkedIn) and the rest should, in addition to buying influence, have the democrats change their spiel from “make billionaires pay their fair share” to “make republican billionaires pay their fair share, too!”
Actually we already have a wealth tax. It’s called the property tax.
