Tag Archives: billionaires

An Interesting Place To Draw The Line

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On March 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about Bernie Sanders’ new tax idea–tax the billionaires–they shouldn’t even exist. Okay, billionaires have a lot of money, much of it made in the technology field, but Bernie Sanders has a lot of money too, all of it made while he was a public servant.

The article notes:

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.

Just for laughs, let’s talk about Bernie Sanders’ wealth.

According to Gazette Direct:

Between 2009 and 2018, Sanders and his wife, Jane, reported a combined income of $4.7 million, largely fueled by his writing. His other books, such as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and Where We Go from Here, added to his finances, with royalties ranging from $170,000 to $850,000 in peak years.

Real estate is another pillar of Sanders’ wealth. He and Jane own three properties. Their primary home is a four-bedroom house in Chittenden County, Vermont, purchased in 2009 for $405,000, now valued at around $440,000. They also own a townhouse in Washington, D.C., bought in 2007 for $488,999, which has appreciated to an estimated $685,000. Their vacation home, a lakeside cabin in Vermont, was acquired in 2016 for $575,000, a steal compared to its original listing price of $775,000. These properties, though mortgaged, contribute significantly to his assets.

Notice that Bernie Sanders is going after billionaires–not millionaires (because he is one). Somehow socialists always want other peoples’ money while keeping their own.

People Vote With Their Feet

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On Saturday, The New York Post reported that in the past four years, ten billionaires have changed their residences from New York to Florida.

The article reports:

New York has lost 10 billionaires in the last four years — three of whom fled to Florida — leaving tax coffers lighter by tens of millions of dollars annually.

This year 62 New York-based billionaires appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, compared to 72 in 2019 and 65 last year. 

Investor and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, whose net worth was valued at $5.7 billion last year, has grown his fortune to $6.9 billion — but he packed his bags for Florida.

Other billionaires who have relocated from Gotham to the Sunshine State in the last four years include hedge funder Daniel Och — whose net worth now stands at $3.6 billion — and investor Carl Icahn, who’s worth $6.9 billion. 

“You have this incredibly high rate imposed on all of the income of the highest earners [in New York], and living just about anywhere else will substantially reduce your tax burden. Going to Florida will obviously eliminate your individual tax burden, and many of these billionaires clearly have that flexibility,” the National Tax Foundation’s vice president, Jared Walczak, explained.

The article notes:

New York relies on the top 1% of taxpayers to pay for 42% of its tax receipts, and billionaires’ incomes are taxed at the state’s highest rate — a staggering 14.8%, according to Walczak.

Although it’s impossible to quantify the exact loss in state taxes from billionaires’ fleeing without access to private income documents, “If you had someone who was earning $100 million [a year] in New York suddenly move to Florida, that’s something like a $11 million-a-year hit per year recurring to the state,” said Ken Girardin, the research director for the Albany-based think tank, Empire Center for Public Policy.

Even with the tax accountants and tax lawyers that billionaires can afford to hire, eventually they reach the point where it is not worth it to stay in a state that takes more money from them then the Medieval Lords took from the peasants. I just hope that when the leave New York, they leave their big spending government ideas behind.

This Is Really Not Surprising

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The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about Bernie Sanders’ plan for healthcare for everyone.

The article reports:

Bernie Sanders is proposing a new wealth tax on billionaires called the ‘Make Billionaires Pay’ act.

He wants to tax wealth they have generated during the Coronavirus pandemic, to fund healthcare for all Americans for one year.

Only for one year?

The article includes some information from CNBC:

Sen. Sanders proposes one-time tax that would cost Bezos $42.8 billion, Musk $27.5 billion

Top tech leaders and other billionaires would be forced to hand over billions of dollars in wealth they’ve gained during the coronavirus pandemic under a new bill introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

The “Make Billionaires Pay Act” would impose a one-time 60% tax on wealth gains made by billionaires between March 18, 2020, and Jan. 1, 2021. The funds would be used to pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses for all Americans for a year. As of Aug. 5, the bill would tax $731 billion in wealth accumulated by 467 billionaires since March 18, according to a press release. If passed, the bill would tax billionaires on wealth accumulated through the end of the year, however.

Under the bill, tech and other business titans who have seen their wealth shoot up during the pandemic would take huge charges. Amazon and Walmart, for example, have both seen their stocks grow as Americans increasingly relied on their services during stay-at-home orders during the pandemic.

Does anyone remember that Bernie Sanders wanted to tax all millionaires until he became one? The thing to remember here is that billionaires have tax accountants who know how to move money around so that it is not taxable. What happens next is that the program that the tax on billionaires is supposed to fund goes into effect and does not have the money to fund it. At that point, the ‘little people’ like us have to pick up the slack in taxes to pay for the program because we don’t have tax accountants that know how to move money around to avoid taxes. Eventually the middle class pays for all tax increases aimed at the rich. Bernie Sanders and his friends need to study the Laffer Curve. The Bernie Sanders plan is a surefire way to get corporations and their executives to move money overseas (just after President Trump has managed to bring a lot of that money back into America).