By Brad Polumbo
Friday, August 28, 2020
It’s a well-observed truth that when you tax something,
you get less of it. What many of today’s Democrats don’t seem to understand is
that the rule applies just as much to taxes on wealth itself as to taxes on,
say, cigarettes or alcohol.
Progressive California state legislators recently
proposed an extreme tax that would even follow residents who flee the state
with their assets: a 0.4 percent annual tax not on income, but on wealth
itself, applied to all Californians with assets totaling $30 million or more.
Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s long-time championing of a wealth tax has
caught on with the Democratic base at large. A February poll by The Hill
found that a whopping 85 percent of Democrats support imposing wealth taxes on
the rich.
There’s just one problem: These punitive taxes have
serious negative consequences not just for the wealthy, but for the economy at
large.
“Wealth is accumulated savings, which is needed for
investment,” Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards explains.
“The fortunes of the richest Americans are mainly socially beneficial business
assets that create jobs and income, not private consumption assets. Raising
taxes on wealth would boomerang against average workers by undermining their
productivity and wage growth.”
This isn’t just a theoretical downside of wealth taxes. A
mountain of research shows that they don’t work. The latest evidence comes
courtesy of two Rice University economists, who in a new
paper studied the effects of something along the lines of Warren’s
proposals: a tax of 2 percent on household wealth above $50 million and 6
percent on household wealth of $1 billion or higher.
The economists found that such a wealth tax would cause a
2.7 percent decrease in the size of the economy over the next 50 years. That
may sound relatively small, but it translates to trillions of dollars in
American wealth that would never get created. They further found that a wealth
tax would destroy 1.8 million jobs. It’s not hard to see why. If you make your
country’s policies hostile to the wealthy and successful, they’ll take their
wealth — and their businesses — elsewhere. They’ll also adapt their behavior
and spending decisions domestically to avoid the tax. So, it’s no surprise that
the Rice paper also concluded the average household’s income would drop by
roughly $2,500 as a result of this supposedly “progressive” tax’s implementation.
The economists did find that the wealth tax would hurt
America’s wealthiest 1 percent, which would of course be the whole point. Yet
despite the rhetoric of the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, they also found
that middle-class families would suffer too, with decreases in lifetime
household income ranging from roughly $500 to $50,000.
“A wealth tax would shrink GDP, reduce annual household
incomes and result in lost wages and American jobs,” Center for Freedom and
Prosperity chairman Dan Mitchell said in response to this research’s
publication. “It would be very bad news for our economy and for families in all
economic tiers.”
If the research of economists at Rice and elsewhere
weren’t convincing enough, there’d also be the empirical evidence from
countries where wealth taxes have already been tried. The Tax Foundation’s
Daniel Bunn has pointed
out that the number of developed countries with a wealth tax has dropped
dramatically in recent decades, from a peak of 14 countries in 1995 to just
four countries by 2015. Why? Because many of the European nations that adopted
them later abandoned them when they failed to raise revenue and caused clear economic
harm.
Remember, the wealthy are the most mobile members of
society and rather adept at avoiding taxes. For this reason, even progressive
economists think Warren’s projection that $187 billion would be raised by her
wealth tax is a vast
overestimate.
The truth is that wealth taxes are a horrible way to
raise revenue for government programs. They really only serve a political end:
satisfying frenzied voters who want to “soak the rich.”
That may be enough for today’s progressives. But the rest
of us — rich, poor, and middle class alike — should hope that they don’t get
their way.
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