Elizabeth Warren is *looking increasingly like the candidate who gets the Democrat presidential nomination. Should any Democrat get elected as president in 2020 that would be bad news for the economy, given that they are all running on the theory that the more free stuff they can promise the more likely they are to win.
Liz Warren may not be the worst, but she has made some truly awful remarks, for example, echoing Obama's "you didn't build that" excuse for taxing the rich. Except in her case, it's a proposed tax on assets. Real property owners are well acquainted with that concept. Applying a tax to assets other than real property will require a huge bureaucracy of appraisers that will tell people how much their personal property is worth. Hiding assets will become a new pastime for the bazillionaires Warren targets.
Mona Charen makes a cogent argument against the Warren plan:
The only way to achieve a Scandinavian-style welfare state is to do what the Scandinavians do — tax the heck out of the middle class.
Elizabeth Warren’s approach is 1960s Great Society stuff. She would build public housing, throw money at the opioid epidemic, break up big tech companies, break up agribusiness firms, introduce a new corporate profits tax, and on and on. Implicit in every plan is the notion that the government is competent to spend money and run things for everyone’s benefit. That worked so well the last time.
The economy will suffer, the good times will end, and everyone will suffer -- except the rich who Warren so much wants to punish.
P.S. The title of this piece is a play on the words of the Lizzie Borden poem.
*At the time of this writing, Election Betting Odds has Warren at the top of the heap at 40.2% and the next runner up, Biden, at 24.3%.
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2:18 PM 9/22/2019
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