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For fair tax policy

Posted on February 14, 2019 by Sonoma Valley Sun

Elizabeth Warren has proposed a tax on wealth, something that is long overdue. There has been no effective way of limiting the tendency of wealth to feed on itself, and that growth has now become explosive.

Some of America’s richest families can now sit back, do nothing, and watch their wealth grow by as much as $10 million dollars a day. Moreover, by investing in municipal securities some or all of this growth can be tax-free. Of course, to turn this into cash they must sell some of their appreciated assets, and that generates a capital gains tax. But a capital gains tax does not touch inherited wealth, which remains inviolable — until the inevitable inheritance tax when someone dies.

Capitalism is a great system (why else would virtually every country in the world have adopted it?) but it has one key flaw, and that is the provision to limit wealth as it grows beyond all reasonable bounds.

— Jim Bowden. Sonoma

 



One thought on “For fair tax policy

  1. In 1968, I got a job working at 45 Wall St. for U.S. Trust, now a division of Bank of America. I was responsible for managing personal trusts. One was for the widow of a Vanderbilt who developed Mt. Shasta as a sky resort. We used the trust to pay all the workers who serviced the sky resort. The problem with vast inherited wealth is it creates a group of people who never have to contribute and in many cases don”t. They belong to the “lucky sperm club”. Thomas Jefferson warned against inherited wealth because it would create an Aristocracy! Donald Trump is a classic example. He inherited $400,000,000 and we are experiencing what a bought Presidency looks like! Obama and Clinton made it on Merit and inherited nothing!

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