Bernie Sanders calls for wealth tax

The logical conclusion if you're looking to close the wealth gap. Taxing income will never do it.

Will the proposal gain any steam?

 

Good god, what would the top .25% do without an extra few million? This is catastrophic.

 

Wealth is always being redistributed one way or another. Those tax breaks don't write themselves.

 

This is a great plan if you can stomach the idea of the entire country subsisting on imported food. Taxing all assets will put many farmers out of business.

 

Buffett is worth $66 billion. Think I saw somewhere that he's a decent philanthropist, but still ...

He could give away $10 billion and never notice. He could give away 25 billion and never notice.

 

According to Mr. Sanders, taxing the top .25 percent of wealthiest Americans...

 

Get rid of all the cheating loopholes in the tax code and you won't have to ask anyone for a higher rate.

 

I think quite a few of the 99.75 percent would find Bernie Sanders' proposal interesting.

But only after they're done watching four days of football, 35 hours a week of reality TV, and two hours of illegally obtained nude celebrity pics.

Unfortunately, the top 0.25 percent targeted by Sanders' tax is the only portion of the U.S. population that pays attention to politics.

 

In the interest of disclosure, I'll make it clear here that I work in PR for an ag advocacy organization.

That said, I'd still want to see where that line is in net worth. Admittedly, I didn't spend a lot of time digging for it, but what I did find was a University of Michigan study using 2011 data that placed a net worth of $1.147 m in the 95th percentile. What's the figure for the 99.75th percentile? How many people are we talking about?

 

The top 400 families own half of America's wealth. I'm thinking he is talking about them primarily.

But setting the bar at $25 million would seem OK.

None of this will ever happen, of course.

 

You're getting your figures and your terms mixed up.

The top 400 families have a net worth of around $2 trillion. The rest of us have about that net worth, too. That doesn't mean the top 400 own half of America's wealth.

There's considerably more wealth in America than $4 trillion. Even rough estimates peg the true total wealth of the U.S. at close to $120 trillion.