Warren's Wealth Tax

[Yonadav]

In regard to taxes, one of our biggest problems is offshore. That's why I said that I like Warren's plan so much.  Raising taxes on the wealthy simply won't do any good at all, as long as they have a way to dodge the taxes. The more you raise taxes, the more aggressive they become about avoiding them.

The post WWII tax of over ninety percent is a bit misleading.  That was at a time when the bulk of our economy was domestic. People didn't really have anywhere that they could go with their money. The choice was to either take profits as personal income or reinvest. The very high tax on very high incomes discouraged people from taking profits as personal income that they would then hoard. It encouraged them to reinvest the money, instead. So almost no one paid that really high tax. There were always better options than that.  I agree with AOC that it would probably be a good idea to have a system like that again, but it isn't something that is likely to generate a bunch of extra revenue for the government. But it absolutely doesn't make sense to try to put it in place before we have our offshore beast under control. Jacking up taxes before the offshore beast is under control would just cause more of our national wealth to move offshore.

Well yea. The amount of overseas tax hiding exploded with Reagan. 

It isn't either or. I agree with Warren, we need to regulate and close these loopholes, but even with that, AOC's tax rate also needs to be implemented.

In theory, offshore tax dodging slowed down a little bit with Reagan. One of the ideas behind low corporate taxes is to encourage offshore money to find its way home. I'm not saying that it works.  An awful lot of offshore money did return during Reagan's presidency, but that had nothing to do with taxes. It happened because of Reagan's experiment with Monetarism. When M1 went up, the fed would respond with rate hikes. But instead of M1 shrinking a little, a bunch of offshore money would come flooding in.