Another New York Times story!
The war on the rich is ramping up. The left is out for blood and they will try to extract every dollar and penny from the affluent, exploiting the feelings of envy.
In recent weeks, we have had politicians want to impose new taxes on the rich, claim being wealthy is immoral, and accuse the rich of blood on the streets.
It’s getting bad out there.
The latest proposal? Outlawing billionaires, so says one The New York Times columnist.
Here is what Farhad Manjoo wrote (emphasis ours):
Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power, garnering this level of adulation, while the rest of the economy scrapes by…
Abolishing billionaires might not sound like a practical idea, but if you think about it as a long-term goal in light of today’s deepest economic ills, it feels anything but radical. Instead, banishing billionaires — seeking to cut their economic power, working to reduce their political power and attempting to question their social status — is a pithy, perfectly encapsulated vision for surviving the digital future.
Billionaire abolishment could take many forms. It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty, but more likely it would mean higher marginal taxes on income, wealth and estates for billionaires and people on the way to becoming billionaires. These policy ideas turn out to poll very well, even if they’re probably not actually redistributive enough to turn most billionaires into sub-billionaires.
More important, aiming to abolish billionaires would involve reshaping the structure of the digital economy so that it produces a more equitable ratio of superrich to the rest of us.
Aside from those who got rich using the state, why should the government ban billionaires? Men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became really wealthy by satisfying consumer demand and giving the public what it wants. Why should jealous leftists penalize that?
The progressives only know one thing: force. This is further proof why taxes are a slippery slope; they go from providing the basics of government to funding progressive cause du jours to outright prohibition on success.
Here is a better idea: let’s abolish The Times – a part of all the misery and suffering in the world.
The hypocrisy of the New York Slimes is beyond reproach. This is a newspaper that is owned by a billionaire family that has used multiple schemes to keep their corporation under family control for generations.
Years ago, the family created two classes of stock, with only one of those classes having the right to vote for directors. They placed the stock in a family trust, to ensure that only family members would control the company’s direction, even though they don’t have as much skin in the game as the public stockholders.
Within the last 30 years, as the company was undergoing financial stress, they sought the help of a Mexican billionaire named Carlos Slim to bail them out of trouble by making an investment in the company.
Over the years, the family has used every available feature of the tax code to keep control within the family so that there never is an estate tax bill when a family member dies, as they keep their wealth for generations. And they also keep control of the paper.