(10-28-2021, 05:15 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: It's one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas.  Finance a huge expansion of the welfare state by confiscating the wealth of the richest Americans. 

"Hey, we don't like rich people.  They have all the money.  Let's take some of it and spend it on ourselves." 

That's all it is.  Just jealousy, greed, and wanting the government to pay for everyone to have an easier life where we don't have to work if we don't want to.

This idea is being pushed by people who don't understand how an economy works, how jobs are created, and how the wealth that we all share is created.

And the thing is, the whole plan is built on sand.  Suppose we tax the richest people based on the gains in their stock portfolios.  What if the market has a correction, say, 25%?  Do they now have a tax loss carryforward that would last for years and years while the market recovers?  Meanwhile, we would be spending trillions of additional dollars on social programs and it would then not be paid for because the billionaire tax would have failed due to the stock market correction.  And what about the trillions they propose to raise with this tax?  If the stock market has a correction, does the government now have to refund all the tax they collected?  We'd not only be paying out trillions in the new welfare state expansion, we'd also be paying out trillions additionally, right back to the billionaires who paid it in the first place.  

If you look back at the history of the United States, there are people who built this country, like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and more recently, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.  And yes, they got rich doing it.  I don't mind that one bit.  They deserve it.  So much of what we have today is because of them.   Look around you at all the things you have because some guy invested a bunch of money, took a huge risk, and created a million jobs.  So what if he got rich doing it?  You benefitted, too.  You have an automobile, a personal computer, a cell phone.  Not to mention, millions of people have jobs.  

Yes, we can take their money, hand it out to everyone, and have a nice easy life for a little while.  And when the money runs out, we'll all be equal.  Equally poor.