No one in America really likes billionaires. No one cheers for them. No one trusts them. If they were drowning, few of us would even toss them a life preserver.
Except that each and every one of us dreams of being one anyway.
And while everyone believes that billionaires should pay their “fair share” in taxes, it’s difficult to figure out just what constitutes a “fair share” when they’re paying 40% of what the government takes in from individuals already.
Regardless, none of these people got rich paying their “fair share” of anything. Indeed, the key to wealth in America is shielding as much of your income as possible from the taxman.
It’s a lousy system designed by the rich to benefit the rich. So why oppose a new tax on billionaires that is being offered by Joe Biden in the 2023 budget?
That budget will spend $5.3 trillion — at least a trillion of which we don’t even have yet. It’s in the pockets of our great, great, great, great … grandchildren.
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So before we lift any more money from the wallets of our descendants, we have a moral duty to cut every single dollar possible from this budget and the next 50 succeeding budgets before we dare add any more of a burden to the citizen’s tax bill — be it to a billionaire or pauper.
Biden’s scheme to tax billionaires an extra pittance won’t lower the deficit. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered about increasing taxes, it’s that the promised increase in revenue usually falls a little short of predictions. Somehow, in this arms race between the taxman and the rich man’s accountant, the accountant always seems to come out ahead.
Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Tuesday shot down President Biden’s new plan to raise $360 billion in revenue by imposing a 20 percent minimum tax on billionaires, a proposal the president formally unveiled Monday in his budget request to Congress.
Manchin says he doesn’t support the president’s plan to tax the unrealized gains of billionaires, which would set a new precedent by taxing the value an asset accrues in theory before it is actually sold and converted into cash.
Manchin may be old-fashioned when he says basically that wealth is something you can hold in your hand, not something that appears as pixels on a computer screen.
“You can’t tax something that’s not earned. Earned income is what we’re based on,” he told The Hill. “There’s other ways to do it. Everybody has to pay their fair share.”
“Everybody has to pay their fair share, that’s for sure. But unrealized gains is not the way to do it, as far as I’m concerned,” he added.
There are a lot of landmines in Biden’s proposal that Machin doesn’t like, but the bottom line is the simple question of fairness. If you’re going to tax someone’s wealth, it should be based on the actual value of an asset, which can only be calculated when another individual determines how much they’re willing to pay for it.
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