The Washington Post editorial board shocked the internet by vigorously thwacking the nutty socialist tax proposals by one of the left’s most radical icons in Congress: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The Post editorial board concluded that Sanders’ gambit to impose an annual, five percent confiscatory wealth tax on America’s billionaires would “strangle America’s golden goose” in a March 2 editorial. The goal, the editorial board said bluntly, was based on “stealing half their fortunes.”
Bernie's pie-in-the-sky notion that the exhausted redistribution-of-wealth scheme would somehow raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years to “fund a wishlist of progressive fantasies” was just plain unrealistic, The Post rebuked. “Even for billionaires, a 5 percent tax on every asset they own would virtually wipe out any gains they make in a normal year.” Yeah, and how is that beneficial for a U.S. economy that’s still getting over the residues of an inflation disaster that Biden’s and Bernie's spending obsession contributed to?
Not even the historically left-wing Post editorial could even attempt to justify the illusory economics behind Sanders’ push to fuel more government waste, and even went as far as to conclude it was “unconstitutional” on its face:
In addition to being unconstitutional, a federal tax on unrealized gains would force people to sell illiquid assets every year. A lot of AI founders, for example, are billionaires on paper, but their shares are effectively worthless until their businesses deliver on their promises and go public.
If that wasn’t red-pilled enough, The Post conceded that for “all the protestations about ‘fairness,’ the U.S. already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world.” Oh, no kidding!
This is quite the turnaround from what The Post was bleating about in 2021 when Biden was in office: “A wealth tax is a good idea — if we had a different Supreme Court.” Even when The Post editorial board itself expressed past skepticism over the wealth tax idea in July 2021, it still tried to find some middle ground on sticking it to the wealthy: “It’s important to ask the wealthy to pay more. It’s also important to do it the right way.” Now, it appears the newspaper is doing away with the niceties and outright condemning the whole proposal for the Soviet-ish nonsense that it always was:
The federal government struggles to administer the already complicated tax code; thousands of new bureaucrats would need to be hired to fight with tax lawyers over asset valuations for collections of wines, art, jewelry, and yachts.
It’s a wonder what would have happened if Post owner Jeff Bezos instituted his free market reforms to his financially profligate newspaper sooner before it started teetering on the verge of collapse.
