Elizabeth Warren 2020

[DSeid]

@CarnalK

Here’s the thing for me: being able to weather an attack is generally a skill you learn, not an innate ability. Given the DNA test debacle, we can assume she’s not a natural. She is unfortunately set up as a minor saint in the party and so I seriously doubt she’s going to get the practice she needs.

So if “not being able to weather an attack” is your line in the sand for Warren, I advise you to accept that it’s likely true and/or get over it. If you are stuck on the notion of only considering the top two polling, you are faced with two very flawed candidates. You shouldn’t take Biden’s gaffumbling as so “baked in” to his current numbers. When you’re as old as him, people read stuff into it even if you’ve been doing it forever. Most people voting haven’t been closely following Biden forever.

I am always faced with flawed candidates. Even Obama who I loved more than any other candidate I’ve ever voted for was flawed.

But as the current best evidence is that she cannot weather attacks well it would be against all logic to just “accept that it’s likely true” that she can, that somehow she has suddenly learned how.

I am looking past lots of what else I consider her flaws. Her attempt to sell the political poison pill of healthcare includes misrepresenting both what she is selling and how what we have works. Her position on nuclear is actively harmful to the goal of avoiding catastrophic climate change. (And that is from someone who is not a complete fan.) She is ill-equipped on international policy. I can look past lots of those flaws if I conclude she is in balance the most electable.

If a candidate cannot manage attacks well they are not electable in my mind. It is disqualifying as a candidate no matter what I think of how they’d be as president. Biden’s been attacked and attacked and attacked this cycle and his lead is staying pretty much the same with those who actually plan on voting. And lots are now paying attention.

Until I see that Warren can handle those sorts of negative cycles too my support of her is extremely tentative and subject to flipping back at a moment’s notice.

Obviously I as an individual don’t matter much … but I suspect that I am not too dissimilar to many others who are open to considering both of them.

[Sherrerd]

@DSeid

… the current best evidence is that she cannot weather attacks well …

You’ve made this assertion more than once without specifying what allegedly poor-performances in weathering attacks you mean. “The current best evidence” seems to imply a number of such performances or incidents.

If you mean ‘in response to months of attacks on her for having said she had Native American heritage, she had a DNA test done’—that’s one incident. And its’s one that is not clearly or by consensus a failure to Weather Attacks Well. Are there instances of her lashing out, or running from the room in tears, or throwing things, or something else that would reasonably signal a failure to be able to weather attacks?

If there are other incidents that you feel support your claim, could you detail them?

[DSeid]

The floundering over that was particularly pathetic. Her “quips” of Trump not wanting to fight a girl, also pretty sad. The way she dealt with the crowd laughing inappropriately at her story in debate two was also not reassuring of someone able to handle it if the crowd is unfriendly.

Can you point me to any times she’s been attacked and has handled it well? I want to see them!

If the only examples that exist are ones like those, and none of her responding skillfully, then that’s what current best evidence we’ve got.

[CarnalK]

@Sherrerd

If you mean ‘in response to months of attacks on her for having said she had Native American heritage, she had a DNA test done’—that’s one incident. And its’s one that is not clearly or by consensus a failure to Weather Attacks Well.

Her response was a failure in the consensus view. And it was a response she had months to prepare and used as her campaign pseudo-launch. That’s an ugly miss.

[neutro]

She loses me with all the crank up the taxes stuff.

[Lord_Feldon]

@SlackerInc

As Mayor Pete very astutely wondered aloud, why can’t she trust people to make their own choices?

I think pretty much all of the candidates (even Biden and Delaney and such) are wildly deluded about the chances of getting any major health insurance reform through, and I’d much prefer to hear a lot less about the whole issue given that the primary has so little impact on it, but how many people currently have “choices” between plans?

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@neutro

She loses me with all the crank up the taxes stuff.

Do you have a billion dollars?

[septimus]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

Do you have a billion dollars?

Let’s be fair. A man with $999 million — not even a billion — would be stripped all the way down to $980 billion in the first year, if he reported all his wealth. Even someone with merely $53 million would have to shell out $60,000 in new tax.

(Of course the tax-collector would have to find the wealth to tax it. Metal detectors can find gold, but not diamonds or rubies. And AFAICT some valuable modern art could be hidden in a collection of kindergarterner paintings. )

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@septimus

Let’s be fair. A man with $999 million — not even a billion — would be stripped all the way down to $980 billion in the first year, if he reported all his wealth. Even someone with merely $53 million would have to shell out $60,000 in new tax.

(Of course the tax-collector would have to find the wealth to tax it. Metal detectors can find gold, but not diamonds or rubies. And AFAICT some valuable modern art could be hidden in a collection of kindergarterner paintings. )

Yeah, there was this very solemn, wiser-than-thou article in the Washington Post about her proposal:

@WaPo

But there’s another way of looking at how this tax would impact the country’s wealthiest families: The 15 largest fortunes in the country would be, on average, half their current size if the tax had been in place since 1982, according to new figures published by a pair of economists who helped Warren write her wealth tax proposal.

Instead of $97 billion, Microsoft founder Bill Gates would now have $36.4 billion, according to the figures. Rather than $44.9 billion, Walmart heiress Alice Walton would be sitting on $15 billion. Instead of $160 billion, Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos would have $86.8 billion.

Some economists, seizing on such numbers, say Warren’s tax could do more than just make the wealthy uncomfortable: It could erase great fortunes.

I don’t think even 86.8 billion dollars could buy a violin tiny enough for me to play out my sorrows for Jeff Bezos. Imagine the Walmart heiress having to survive on only $15 billion!

Christ almighty. I don’t advocate the guillotine, but articles like this give me insight into 1780s France.

[Chronos]

That looks to me like a feature, not a bug. If you can’t maintain a fortune, by continuing to add something of value to the world, then you don’t deserve to keep that fortune.

[Bone]

I would imagine that any such confiscatory tax scheme would be met with capital flight such that the purported benefits would not be realized. I doubt Alice Walton would take no action in the face of being taxed $20B.

[asahi]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Yeah, there was this very solemn, wiser-than-thou article in the Washington Post about her proposal:
I don’t think even 86.8 billion dollars could buy a violin tiny enough for me to play out my sorrows for Jeff Bezos. Imagine the Walmart heiress having to survive on only $15 billion!

Christ almighty. I don’t advocate the guillotine, but articles like this give me insight into 1780s France.

The article exemplifies what’s wrong with the current economic system and its perverse tendencies to accelerate wealth concentration. We’re now 1 1/2 generations into the post-Reagan era in politics and we’ve fully moved from a society that had a fairly healthy, albeit flawed and wasteful, welfare system, to a culture in which we accept as normal that there is endemic hyper-inequality, and that this is just a normal consequence of healthy capitalism.

The fortunes of Gates, Walton, and Bezos could be put to better use by a system that discourages concentration of wealth and instead encourages better wages, which is one major problem that low tax systems create. It would result in a slower-growth economy, but that could be offset by an augmented welfare state.

[asahi]

@neutro

She loses me with all the crank up the taxes stuff.

Cranking up the taxes is one thing; promising to take choices away when it comes to healthcare is another. Joe Biden is more in tune with the rest of the country than Sanders and Warren: people want their insurance options improved, not removed. That’s ultimately the issue that would torpedo either Warren or Sanders in a race against Trump. The irony is that democrats would lose on an issue that should help them: healthcare. They would lose because they’re misreading the public mandate.

[Babale]

@Bone

I would imagine that any such confiscatory tax scheme would be met with capital flight such that the purported benefits would not be realized. I doubt Alice Walton would take no action in the face of being taxed $20B.

She’s welcome to leave. So long as she’s fine with Wal-Mart not being allowed to do business in the United States until she pays what she owes.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Babale

She’s welcome to leave. So long as she’s fine with Wal-Mart not being allowed to do business in the United States until she pays what she owes.

Something like that. It’s not like capital flight is an unheard-of-concept that Warren would be shocked to encounter. Her plan has anti-avoidance measures:

@Warren's website

The proposal also includes strong anti-evasion measures, including but not limited to:

a significant increase in the IRS enforcement budget;

a minimum audit rate for taxpayers subject to the Ultra-Millionaire Tax;

a 40% “exit tax” on the net worth above $50 million of any U.S. citizen who renounces their citizenship; and systematic third-party reporting that builds on existing tax information exchange agreements adopted after the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

In general, if you find a trivial objection to a Warren plan, it’s likely that the objection is already answered. Sure, people will search for a way to avoid this tax, just like people try to avoid all taxes. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad proposal. It just means that enforcement needs to be part of the proposal.

Edit: also, to be clear, Alice Walton’s $20B tax burden would’ve been paid over the past 37 years (and, to be ultra-pedantic, not all of that wealth shrinkage would’ve been directly paid to the IRS). It’s not like she’d take that as an immediate hit.

My violin is shrinking as I type.

[Babale]

Not to mention that her family would have made a lot less money if we weren’t subsidizing them through welfare benefits to Wal-Mart employees to the tune of 7.8 billion dollars a year.

If that violin gets any smaller, it’s gonna pop right out of existence.

[SlackerInc]

It’s not constitutional. Just raise income taxes on the wealthy along the lines of what AOC proposes.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

It’s not constitutional.

No all agree with that.

Column: Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal is constitutional, experts say...

The notion that a wealth tax is unconstitutional derives from a provision of the Constitution prohibiting “direct” taxation unless it’s “apportioned among the states.” That’s generally taken to mean that the amount raised from each state must be proportionate to its population.

But two legal scholars say this constitutional interpretation is wrong. They’re Dawn Johnsen of Indiana University and Walter Dellinger, a former U.S. solicitor general, of Duke University. Their analysis appeared last year, and is regarded as the leading work on the issue, though their position isn’t unanimously held. (Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for bringing it to my attention.)

Johnsen and Dellinger dismiss the constitutionality issue as “conventional wisdom” that is casually repeated but is the product of “faulty constitutional understanding.” It’s partially the result of a Supreme Court ruling in 1895 known as Pollock that was narrowly — and they say wrongly — decided, and that has been undermined by a string of subsequent Supreme Court decisions.

It’s also generally disdained by legal authorities. Among them is Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School, who wrote in 1999 that before Pollock, the court used a very narrow definition of “direct tax,” and has returned to that narrow view since. As a unanimous court declared in 1983, he noted, “Congress’ power to tax is virtually without limitation.”

The “direct tax” language in the Constitution, Johnsen and Dellinger observe, was murky even to the drafters. The Constitution refers explicitly only to a “capitation” or head tax, which is levied on each individual and thus can be easily apportioned by population. The authors assert that the clause wasn’t the product of “any principled decision to limit Congress’s authority to tax income, property, or wealth.”

In any event, the court rejected Pollock only a few years later, by upholding an estate tax and a gift tax — that is, a tax on net worth. After the 16th Amendment, which declared an income tax constitutional, was ratified in 1913 as a response to Pollock, discussions of the constitutionality of taxes other than the head tax dropped off the Supreme Court docket.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/taxation/publications/abataxtimes_home/19aug/19aug-pp-johnson-a-wealth-tax-is-constitutional/

In any case, Pollock was bad history when it was decided, and it quickly became a pariah and shrank in importance. Justice Harlan described Pollock at the time as the “decision [that] will become as hateful with the American people as the Dred Scott case.”61 Looking back, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. judged that Pollock was an inappropriate overreaction to the populist William Jennings Bryan, a vague terror that was translated into “doctrine that had no place in the Constitution.”62 Almost immediately the Supreme Court began retreating from what it later called its “mistaken theory” in Pollock,63 by expanding the definition of “excise tax” elastically to include taxes that were obvious assaults on wealth, including the estate tax,64 a corporate gross receipts tax,65 the corporate income tax,66 and a tax on Chicago Board of Trade commodity transactions.67 The elastic expansion of “excise” to avoid apportionment of the tax was solely a tool to confine Pollock to its facts because the original 1787 meaning of “excise” meant only a tax on whiskey68 and other sins.69 The Sixteenth Amendment, passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states, allowed a tax on income without apportionment, putting the last nail in Pollock’s coffin.

The Founders believed in the wealth tax. Apportionment was designed to reach wealth by taxing states according to a proxy for relative wealth, using the best measurement of wealth that was then available. To turn a requirement designed to make it easier to tax wealth into a rule exempting wealth from taxation is to turn the Founders’ meaning upside down. The progressive idea of a wealth tax, like the estate tax, is clearly constitutional. ■

[CarnalK]

@Bone

I would imagine that any such confiscatory tax scheme would be met with capital flight such that the purported benefits would not be realized. I doubt Alice Walton would take no action in the face of being taxed $20B.

It’s not anything remotely close to that though. That excerpt was calculating smaller fortunes being amassed over a 36 year period with the Warren tax, not how much their current fortunes would be taxed.

[RTFirefly]

@DSeid

Her position on nuclear is actively harmful to the goal of avoiding catastrophic climate change. (And that is from someone who is not a complete fan.)

She’s adopted the Inslee plan. So the Inslee plan is anti-nuke? Because it’s gotten rave reviews from people like David Roberts at Vox who says we absolutely need nuclear to make it work.

@DSeid

The way she dealt with the crowd laughing inappropriately at her story in debate two was also not reassuring of someone able to handle it if the crowd is unfriendly.

There was plenty of debate commentary after that debate, and I didn’t see a single mention of this. Can you link to the video and tell me what time this happens?