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SHAPIRO: The Left Plans To Eat The Rich

   DailyWire.com
DUBUQUE, IOWA - MARCH 01: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks at a campaign rally at the Stone Cliff Winery on March 1, 2019 in Dubuque, Iowa. Warren is campaigning in the state with the hopes of securing the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
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On Monday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a New York Times column claiming that “multibillion-dollar fortunes” are “anti-democratic.” Video and partial transcript below: 

The Bernie Sanders attack on billionaires, and the Elizabeth Warren attack on billionaires, is cynical and just disgusting. …

Elizabeth Warren is worth $12 million, and there she is [paraphrasing]: “These rich people, these rich people, they must be stopped.” And you got Bernie Sanders, who’s basically a giant welfare queen living off the government for the last 30 years what is he now, he’s 78-years-old living off the government for 50 years of his life. He’s like [paraphrasing]: Oh, well, you know, we can’t let any of these people who actually earned their wealth run anything. They shouldn’t run for office. Only I should! I’ve been useless my entire life, so useless I was kicked off a commune.” 

So you got Bernie ripping into billionaires, and then [you’ve] got Michael Tomasky over at The New York Times saying, “Bill Gates, I implore you to connect some dots.”

“The billionaire class has begun unloading on Elizabeth Warren.” 

You see, it’s a class now. Now, just to recognize a fact: Bill Gates is basically a lifelong Democrat. Warren Buffett is a lifelong Democrat. A lot of these, quote unquote “billionaire class members” are lifelong Democrats, people who’ve given tons of money to left-leaning causes. But they’re a class now, you see. 

This is pure Marxist speak where you are judged by the basis of your income on the basis of your wealth not by what you think, or what you do, or how you vote, or any of that sort of stuff. George Soros is a billionaire, [and he] gives a lot of money to exactly the kinds of people that Jamie Dimon doesn’t like, so treating everybody as a class based on their income is really stupid, in any case. This dumb columnist for The New York Times says: “A few days ago, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase at just $1.6 billion in net worth, a comparative piker said Senator Warren ‘vilifies successful people.’” 

[This] is true. 

“Then Bill Gates ($107 billion), in an onstage interview with The Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, mused about what his tax bill might be in a Warren presidency and left the door open to voting for Trump should Democrats nominate Ms. Warren.”

Which makes sense, because her wealth tax proposal is baloney. 

“And then Michael Bloomberg ($52 billion), who had previously criticized Ms. Warren as anti-corporate, signaled his intention to jump into the race, obviously out of concern at her rise.”

“I’m not expert enough to judge the wisdom of Senator Warren’s proposed wealth tax.” 

Well then, what are you writing about? Like this entire thing is about her wealth tax. 

“I know, there are questions about its constitutionality and that several European nations tried a similar approach and found it unworkable (though four countries still have it). I don’t get why the candidates aren’t simply proposing to increase marginal income tax rates on dollars earned above some very high figure. That seems a lot more straightforward to me.”

The reason the stunning ignorance of The New York Times columnist. The reason, not to justify Elizabeth Warren, [but] the reason she’s proposing a wealth tax is there isn’t enough money at the upper end of the income bracket, in terms of income earned every year, to pay for her proposals. The wealth tax is a confiscatory, nasty tax designed to pay for her garbage proposals that amount to $52 trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years. That’s why she’s going for the wealth tax. You can increase the marginal tax rate, [but] it ain’t going to pay for this stuff. It isn’t. But this guy says:

“So this column is not a brief for Ms. Warren’s wealth tax and for her candidacy I don’t have a preferred candidate. Instead, I want to make a simple plea to the country’s billionaires: Multibillion-dollar fortunes are often called excessive and decadent. But here’s something they’re rarely called but ought to be: Anti-democratic. These fortunes will destroy our democracy.”

Let me get this straight. You earn a billion dollars because you have a bunch of consensual economic transactions of people, and that’s anti-democratic? What is democratic is for the government to come and seize the results of those voluntary transactions? Jeff Bezos has not seized wealth from anyone, but you want the government to do that  who’s more anti-democratic? Bill Gates has not seized wealth from anyone. In fact, he’s provided jobs to hundreds of thousands of people and indirectly, probably millions of people. You want to seize the wealth he has earned on the basis of those voluntary economic transactions  who’s more anti-democratic?

Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. 

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