Jon's Soapbox
An Interesting Take on the Wealth Tax (Summers vs Warren)
(Posted 11-3-2019) - Most of us react viscerally to government taxation, with suspicion and anger directed toward those politicians and bureaucrats spending our hard-earned dollars on things we often don't understand, much less support. But the truth is all functioning societies have arrangements that tax the earnings and/or the transactions of individuals and corporate entities.
It is in general an up-hill battle for any political candidate to successfully argue to constituents that a new taxation category will in fact benefit the vast majority. That is what Elizabeth Warren (and Bernie Sanders) are doing however.
I've linked here to a really easy to read, informative article by Zach Carter, staff political writer for Huffington Post (11/3/2019). He contrasts the protagonists, Larry Summers and Elizabeth Warren in mutually sympathetic terms to help us understand historically why these two powerful intellects have reached mutually exclusive views on how markets should operate most efficiently.
I imagine anyone reading the piece will come down on one side or the other of the question: "Should government tax policy attempt to limit extremes of wealth aggregation in and of itself?" By extreme is meant the aggregation of wealth in the billions (there are currently 585 Billionaires in the USA).
I've noticed that over a few years time links to webzines tend to disappear (or be re-indexed so the link no longer works), so I'm excerpting the entire article written by Mr. Carter and placing it in a PDF file linked here as an archive.
I guess my own reaction is to say 'yeah, throw a 2% annual tax on individual wealth over 50 million' and lets see what happens.