The Patriot Post® · Sanders: Billionaires Should Not Exist

“There should be no billionaires,” Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared yesterday. He added, “We are going to tax their extreme wealth and invest in working people.” Sanders’s message headlined his rollout of his latest policy proposal: a massive tax specifically meant to punish wealthy Americans and redistribute their money. Hello, communism.

Fox News reports, “Sanders’ plan, if enacted into law, would place a 1 percent tax on net worth over $32 million, a 2 percent tax on net worth between $50 million and $250 million, and a 3 percent tax on net worth between $250 million and $500 million. The proposed Sanders tax would increase to 4 percent net worth from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent for net worth from $1 billion to $2.5 billion, and ultimately reach 8 percent for wealth over $10 billion.”

Using tired old leftist class-warfare rhetoric, Sanders asserts, “Under this plan, the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years, which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small, privileged class.”

But Sanders isn’t the only one singing this Marxist tune. Earlier this year, one-percenter Elizabeth Warren unveiled her own tax-the-rich-to-pay-for-socialism scheme. It would levee a 2% annual tax on everything above $50 million and a 3% tax on net worth above $1 billion.

Sanders’s plan to confiscate wealth from billionaires would still fall well short of the money needed to fund all his socialist policy proposals. For example, his Medicare for All plan alone would cost an estimated $32 trillion over the next 10 years, while his billionaire tax would net just $4.35 trillion over the same period of time. So, who ends up making up the near $28 trillion difference?

Both Sanders and Warren claim that their tax proposals would only impact 180,000 and 70,000 households respectively. Clearly, neither Sanders nor Warren recognize the trickle-down effect that raising taxes on the wealthy has upon the economy at large. Like a pebble dropped into a pool, the ripples spread across the entire surface. The simple fact of the matter is that everyone would be impacted by such a grotesque government money grab.