The Man Who Loves To Tax

proposed billionaire tax have nowhere to go to avoid the levy. He and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California have introduced a bill that imposes a 5% annual wealth tax on the country’s billionaires.

Like Robert Reich, the University of California, Berkeley professor and presidential economic adviser, Sanders and Khanna would be pleased to see billionaires driven into extinction.

There are not quite 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. Roughly 200 of them are still in California, even after the departures of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and others who don’t wish to have their earned wealth seized by greedy hands and redistributed politically. It would take a while to drive them all to extinction, but it’s obvious that Sanders and the others who play the politics of envy would sadistically enjoy a painfully drawn-out eradication.

Naturally, they stake out a position based on morality, but if they get their way, they will do deep harm to the country. An advanced economy that has no billionaires is an economy that is in decline. Any economy that loses even a portion of its billionaires will suffer similarly.

Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).

And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.

Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board