Democrats want a massive tax hike on everybody — including you, dear reader — if they can't get an even more massive tax hike on "the rich" and "corporations" when Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts expire next year.
“The main goal here is this can’t just be a debate about the 2017 tax cuts,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said, completely unshy about the threat. He told Bloomberg last week, "This is going to be Tax Armageddon."
Prepare for the end of the world.
Federal income tax revenues jumped nearly $100 billion in the first year after Trump's signature tax cuts went into effect and almost another $40 billion in 2019. The stupid and unnecessary COVID-19 lockdowns derailed that growth in 2020. Since then, revenues have continued to surge. Much of that "growth" was an illusion created by inflation, however, and the rest was due to increased taxes on energy and corporations which, of course, got passed on to consumers.
Reminder: Corporations don't pay taxes; they collect them.
But Democrats are just getting started. The tax man never merely cometh for "the rich."
Washington has a spending problem, and Democrats aren't shy about how to solve it: tax us poor bastards back to the Stone Age.
There are two issues at play here.
The first is that Democrats have a desperate need to wipe out the Trump tax cuts because Orange Man Bad, although they hide it under the usual guise of "taxing the rich."
Speaking at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, "Better to let all the Trump tax cuts expire than be accomplices to another slash-and-burn tax bonanza for America’s billionaires." And while Democrats pretend to adhere to Presidentish Joe Biden's pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 — a promise already broken — Dems continue to float trial balloons about doing just that.
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“We’re going to have a lot of decisions to make about extending cuts or not. We haven’t made decisions about that yet,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), said of Biden's promise, according to Roll Call.
Translation: We are truly determined to tax you poor bastards back to the Stone Age.
The second issue is the Democrats' longstanding desire to impose an unconstitutional wealth tax.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Wa.) chairs the Finance Committee and last Thursday "revived his pitch to tax the appreciation of assets for those with at least $100 million in income," the Wall Street Journal reported. "Wyden plans to run through the door on wealth taxes that the Supreme Court left open Thursday in its lamentable decision in Moore v. U.S."
Warren is already on board the wealth tax train, with threats of a 2% annual tax on the net worth of households with more than $50 million. But like the income tax — which was originally sold as only falling on "the rich" — the real target of a wealth tax is the retirement accounts (and appreciation in home values) of regular Americans because as bank robber Willie Sutton is supposed to have said, "That's where the money is."
What we learned from 2009-2011 and again in 2021-2023 is that if you give Democrats control of Capitol Hill and the White House, they will jack up spending into the stratosphere.
Now the bill for their party is due, and they want us to pay.
"Tax Armageddon," Warner called it.
Yeah, it's the end of the world — and I feel screwed.
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