Breaking the spell of Elizabeth Warren's witchcraft
Exclusive: Lowell Ponte hammers candidate's desperate refusal to admit cost of freebies
Recent polls suggest Elizabeth Warren has overtaken socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and is rapidly gaining on corruptocratic former Vice President Joe Biden, in the race to become the Democrats' 2020 presidential candidate.
The reason for the Massachusetts Senator's success is clear. By promising to tax more away from the productive rich, and to give more freebies to the slacker classes than any other candidate, Warren has cast an hypnotic, mesmerizing spell over one in five Democrat voters.
Maintaining this magical mirage, however, will not be easy. Last week leftist late-night comedian Stephen Colbert would not let Warren get away with her usual forked-tongue claim that her Medicare-for-All would mean "for hardworking families across this country, costs are going to go down."
But "how are you going to pay for it?" Colbert asked. "Are you going to raise taxes on the middle class?" Warren frantically dodged the obvious answer.
Every Democrat should relentlessly be asked these questions about all the gigantic giveaways they are promising, from forgiving $1.6 trillion in government student loans, to free college for all, to a free-for-all $1,000 or more monthly universal basic income, to the $93 trillion Green New Deal.
The logic behind this was spelled out by Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman's word TANSTAAFL, an acronym for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." You may attend an event where ham sandwiches are being given away, but somebody had to grow the wheat, bake the bread, raise the pig and process it into meat, assemble the sandwiches, and deliver them to the event. To the takers, the sandwiches may seem "free," but society's makers paid the price in time, effort and money to produce them.
The "free" goodies that Senator Warren promises can be delivered only through the expenditure of hundreds of trillions of dollars. Break her spell by asking: Who will pay that economy-bankrupting bill?
The traditional Democrat answer is that only "the rich" will be forced to pay, but virtually every adult knows this is ridiculous. Heritage Foundation economist David Burton showed last August in his study – "It is Arithmetically Impossible to Fund the Progressive Agenda by Taxing the Rich" – that the taxes to fund Warren's and the other Democrats' grandiose giveaways must ultimately, directly or indirectly, be paid by you.
In 1913 the new Progressive Income Tax was enacted with promises that only the rich would ever pay it. By 1920 it was already hitting millions of Americans. Warren and her Democrat comrades are eager to boost this tax to 70 percent or more of the income of America's most productive people.
Part of Big Government's progressive sorcery during the past 106 years has been to put a crushing tax burden on business, thereby making companies its unpaid tax collectors that pass corporate taxes on to you in higher prices.
Leftist politicians then say: "Look at those greedy companies! They should be forced to pay even higher taxes!"
But Warren has led the way in demanding a new confiscatory tax – not only on income, but also on wealth itself. If "rich" companies and individuals have been able to save anything, Warren would conjure an annual tax on their lifetime savings – which would lead to the end of any wealth not controlled by government.
One aspect of how Warren's tax on wealth might work has already been written by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) of the Senate Finance Committee in an idea paper titled "Treat Wealth Like Wages."
His plan would eliminate capital gains and other tax provisions that encourage those with savings to take the risk of investing in companies that provide good jobs for American workers and new products for American consumers. Warren and Wyden would magically expropriate such money from free enterprise to government, where politicians would spend it instead to buy votes.
A Warren-Wyden wealth tax, writes Simon Black at SovereignMan.com, would become an annual tithe paid to the federal government on "almost every major asset you own," including things on which you have already repeatedly paid taxes.
"This incudes cash in your bank account," Black writes. "Financial assets like stocks and bonds. Private business and partnership interests. Your entire real estate portfolio. Collectible assets like art and fine wine. … Individual Retirement Accounts." And "household goods," so you "could even pay tax on your toaster oven."
No wonder Elizabeth Warren is so desperate to avoid telling you what taxes she secretly plans to conjure to pay for her politicized, collectivist utopian heaven on Earth.
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