Dumb, smart, poor, rich-but-not-obscenely-rich, Democrat, or even Republican, among we Americans, there is consistent, overwhelming majority support for a wealth tax. The tsunami of polls on this subject is itself a bit overwhelming.
Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,441 American adults found that 64 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.” This general result largely held across demographic categories. There was a difference in support based on political affiliation: 77 percent of Democrats supported the idea of a wealth tax, but among Republicans there was still majority support, with 53 percent of GOP respondents supportive of a wealth tax on the very rich.
Last November, a New York Times/Survey Monkey poll found similar levels of support for a specific wealth tax proposal. Of the 2,672 people surveyed, 63 percent supported Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax that would place an annual 2 percent tax on the wealth of those with assets worth more than $50 million, and a 3 percent annual tax on the wealth of billionaires. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal got the support of 77 percent of Democrats, a very consistent figure compared to general Democratic support for a wealth tax, and the added level of specificity got a few more Republicans on board as well, with 57 percent of GOP respondents expressing favorable views of this policy.
A bevy of additional polls in 2019 from a variety of different polling outlets found varying levels of support for a wealth tax, but all of them found overall majority support for the policy proposal.
That’s quite astonishing, really. It’s rare to get levels of support that high on specific policies in American politics. In antebellum America, there wasn’t even that level of bipartisan majority support for the policy idea that “slavery is bad.”
What’s even more astonishing is such a high level of support for a policy we don’t even have yet and have no clear path to implementing anytime in the near future. Why kind of politician can’t or won’t take action on a policy that clear majorities of both parties want?
Well, the kind who likes money, apparently, and realizes that there are no longer any consequences in our system of government to just ignoring the will of the majority as long as you serve moneyed interests. The one demographic category among which the idea of a wealth tax falls flat is a very small one: the obscenely rich.
In an interview released in January, sports merchandising billionaire Michael Rubin blasted the idea of a wealth tax and said, “What would happen is people won’t start businesses here anymore.” Oh, the same argument that everyone has used against every tax ever that hasn’t resulted in America being anything but the best place in the world for startups? Yeah, OK, go ahead, move to Uganda and start a company from scratch there and make a billion dollars from it, we’ll wait.
Other prominent billionaires to recently slam the idea of a wealth tax include hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, former CEO and promulgator of the $6 coffee Howard Schultz, and megabillionaire Bill Gates. Even Michael Bloomberg, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination seemingly based on the sole qualification of being a billionaire, said that a wealth tax would drive rich people to hide their incomes or withdraw money from the economy. As opposed to the other kinds of taxes that already exist that don’t do that at all -– we lawyers have surely never seen anybody try to hide income based on something like an income tax, for instance.
A lot of billionaires also call a wealth tax unconstitutional. Did everyone just collectively forget that we had to pass a constitutional amendment to put a national income tax on ourselves? That was the Sixteenth, look it up. If we can amend the Constitution to put a tax on everyone, I’m pretty sure we can figure out a way to enact a tax on the tiny sliver of people with more than $50 million dollars, especially when that idea is already enjoying the support of close to two-thirds of the electorate.
Why do we keep letting these grotesquely wealthy people dictate national policy to the rest of us? According to U.S. News, there were 607 billionaires in the United States in 2019. There are about 329,175,736 nonbillionaire Americans. In 2020, the teeming masses should turn the tables and make the billionaires swallow our ideas for a change. Frankly, billionaires should thank whatever gods they keep that two or three percent is all we want.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.