The modern American left has chosen as one of its chief moral scolds a self-described socialist who built a career railing against capitalism while enjoying all the comforts it provides.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a man who once honeymooned in the Soviet Union and who still appears in the Senate chamber looking, as critics often note, like a flood victim, has become one of the Democratic Partys most visible champions of progressive economics despite not even being a registered Democrat. According to RedState, this is the same politician who has never met a tax increase he wasn't in favor of, and who spent years denouncing millionaires until he joined their ranks and quietly shifted his ire to billionaires instead. His latest crusade centers on the claim that Americas wealthiest individuals pay scandalously low tax rates, a narrative that plays well with the activist left but collapses under even modest scrutiny.
Sanders has cited figures that sound explosive on their face. He says that Warren Buffetts tax rate is 0.1%, while the average schoolteacher paid 9.8%. He further claims that Elon Musk, he says, faced a tax rate of 3.3%. Jeff Bezos is less than 1%. Michael Bloombergs is 1.3%, while the average registered nurse paid 13.3%. These numbers are designed to inflame resentment and to paint the American tax system as rigged beyond repair in favor of the ultra-rich.
If that seems too outrageous to be true, thats because it is. The figures Sanders touts are drawn from a ProPublica analysis that does not compare taxes paid to actual income, but to changes in estimated net worth. Those numbers are based on an analysis by the leftist ProPublica, which compared the taxes paid by these billionaires with their , not their . The missing words are crucial: the report effectively substitutes wealth for income, then pretends the tax code is supposed to treat them the same.
But as anyone who pays taxes knows, the government taxes income, not some fanciful measure of wealth. That is not just a matter of policy preference; it is rooted in constitutional structure. The lefts fixation on taxing the rich by going after their wealth directly runs headlong into constitutional limits that progressives either ignore or hope voters never learn.
The Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, provides that The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. At first glance, that language appears broad, and progressives often seize on the general taxing power to justify almost any scheme that promises more revenue and more redistribution. Yet the very next relevant provision tightens the leash considerably.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 states: No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. That restriction is precisely why the federal government could not simply impose a modern income tax at will. That's why we needed the 16th Amendment to implement an income tax, which is not collected in proportion to the Census, while being a direct tax on the citizens. The amendment carved out a specific exception for income, not for wealth.
The 16th Amendment reads: The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. The text is explicit: Congress may tax incomes, not unrealized gains, not paper increases in stock portfolios, and not raw net worth. To convert Sanders rhetoric into law would require another constitutional amendment, a political fantasy in todays polarized environment.
So, Senator Sanders, I'm sorry, you can emit gaseous substances on this all you like, but without a constitutional amendment, you can't tax wealth. You can't. The senators demands for a wealth tax are not merely bad economics; they are flatly incompatible with the current constitutional order. And you aren't going to get that amendment. First, it's a stupid idea; second, in our hotly divisive political environment today, no constitutional amendment is happening. Not for any reason. The lefts habit of promising what the Constitution does not allow is less a policy program than a long-running exercise in demagoguery.
Senator Sanders surely knows this. A man who has spent decades in Congress cannot credibly plead ignorance of the basic framework of federal taxing power. He's pandering; he is shoveling the same stuff I used to shovel while working in the pens in my uncle's livestock auction barn when I was a kid. The strategy is simple: repeat a misleading claim often enough, and hope that low-information people will accept it as fact.
Bernie knows, or at least his handlers know, that if you repeat a lie long enough and often enough, you'll get some low-information people to believe it. That is where the ProPublica numbers come back into play. When examined honestly, even that report undermines the narrative Sanders is selling.
Now, let's look at the facts that the I&I editorial laid out. That same ProPublica report shows that from 2014 to 2018, Buffett paid in taxes, against an income of $125 million. Thats a tax rate of 19%. That is hardly the 0.1 percent Sanders trumpets on the stump.
Jeff Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on income of $4.22 billion. Thats a 23% tax rate. Musks tax rate was even higher 30% since he paid $455 million on income of $1.52 billion. These are substantial effective rates, higher than what many middle-class households pay once deductions and credits are accounted for.
So how did ProPublica manage to force their true tax rates down to near zero? The trick was to redefine the denominator. Simple, they estimated how much their wealth had increased over those same years using estimates compiled by Forbes of the value of their stock, property, and other holdings, then said that, because those gains werent taxed, their true rates are super low. In other words, they treated unrealized, on-paper appreciation as if it were income, then feigned outrage that it was not taxed.
In other words: They lied. They knowingly fudged the data to make a patently untrue claim. That's a lie by any measure. This is not a minor methodological quibble; it is a deliberate attempt to mislead the public about how the tax system actually works, in service of a broader ideological project to normalize wealth confiscation.
This is how the left works, folks. There is no lie so transparent, no claim so ridiculous, that their base won't believe it - and the leaders of the left, the people behind the mid-wit politicians and grifters who are the public faces of the left, know that. They rely on emotional appeals and distorted statistics to justify ever-greater government control over private property, while dismissing constitutional constraints as outdated obstacles to progress.
They are counting on it. And we, on the saner right, had better be prepared to counter it, every day, in any setting, anywhere and anywhen. That means exposing the sleight of hand behind these so-called true tax rates, reminding voters that the Constitution still matters, and insisting that envy is no basis for sound tax policy or for a free society.
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