Joe Biden
Biden to Target Tax-Avoiding Companies Like Amazon With Minimum Federal Levy

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden plans to pay for $3.2 trillion in policy proposals with new and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, including a measure targeting companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. that have reported paying no federal income taxes in recent years. The plan also details his call to end loopholes worth hundreds of billions of dollars and other breaks, including stepped up basis so that individuals can no longer pass on appreciated property without having to pay tax on the gain. The document also outlines Biden’s plan to double the global intangible low tax income rate, known as Gilti, and capping the value of breaks for wealthy taxpayers. He also calls for $200 billion in sanctions on countries that “facilitate illegal corporate tax avoidance.”

Cory Booker

“How Booker would spend $100B boosting historically black colleges and universities,” by Juan Perez Jr.: “According to [Cory] Booker’s campaign, the New Jersey Democrat’s plan adds another wrinkle by putting the schools at the front of his proposals to combat climate change with extra research funding he’d seek to send their way. … “Booker would devote $30 billion to Department of Education grants so that HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions could expand science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs — and also increase their recruitment, retention and graduation rates. Another $30 billion of new money would expand federal grant programs HBCUs can use for infrastructure projects and other capital improvements.”

Pete Buttigieg

Politicians aren’t exactly known for practicing what they preach. It’s rare that they will call out their own. Yet Pete Buttigieg did just that at Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, started by pointing out the glaring contradiction posed by the fact that front-runners such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are campaigning on “soak the rich” rhetoric but are millionaires themselves. “I am the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or billionaire,” Buttigieg said. “We need to stop with the purity tests we can’t pass.”

“Mayor Pete’s Retirement Plan to Tax the Middle Class.” Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg claimed last month that “everything that we have proposed has been paid for, and we have proposed no tax increase on the middle class.” The South Bend, Ind., mayor is incorrect on both counts: He hasn’t said how he’d pay for all his proposed spending. He has endorsed one explicit tax increase on the middle class, and his recent retirement plan provides an outline for another. Add it up, and middle-class workers could face a trillion dollars in new taxes.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren’s big bad idea: Taxing our way to prosperity
Despite the fact that the country is benefiting from one of the strongest economies in history, progressives are peddling unproven economic theories without any credible economic modeling to support their claims.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model found that Warren’s most updated wealth tax proposal would raise as much as $2.7 trillion over a decade, or at least $1 trillion less than Warren’s camp has estimated. The wealth tax would also shrink the economy between 0.9 percent and 2.1 percent in 2050, though that’s largely dependent on how the newly generated revenue is utilized. Richard Prisinzano, the director of policy analysis for the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told Morning Tax that the newest projection assumed that the wealthiest Americans would take more steps to avoid Warren’s expanded wealth tax — perhaps not surprising, given that the top rate would jump from 3 percent for wealth over $1 billion to 6 percent. A preliminary Penn Wharton estimate last month of Warren’s wealth tax drew some criticism for assuming that the revenue raised would go toward deficit reduction, while Warren has proposed spending the proceeds on a range of education initiatives on top of her “Medicare for All” proposal. Prisinzano made it clear that, to the PWBM, revenue for deficit reduction was money well spent. “If you reduce debt, that’s good for the economy, because it’s getting rid of crowd-out and it makes people invest in productive capital,” he said. He added that improvements to early childhood education would certainly be a long-term boost for the economy, but that it would also take longer to reap the overall economic benefits if wealth tax revenue was used toward that end.

ELIZABETH WARREN on Bloomberg TV talking Mike Bloomberg: “‘I don’t believe that elections ought to be for sale,’ Warren said. ‘And I don’t think as a Democratic Party that we should say that the only way you’re going to get elected, the only way you’re going to be our nominee, is either if you are a billionaire or if you’re sucking up to billionaires.'”

How Warren Could Get a Wealth Tax Past the U.S. Supreme Court

  • Liberal scholars looking for ways to make simple idea legal
  • Dutch inspiration, making wealth look like income among ideas
  • Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to enact a wealth tax to pay for their large government programs. The biggest barrier may not be Congress, but the Constitution.
  • So left-leaning tax experts are working on ways to put a wealth tax on a more solid constitutional footing. And there is no shortage of ideas.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the assets of America’s wealthiest individuals continues to draw broad support from voters, across party, gender and educational lines. Only one slice of the electorate opposes it staunchly: Republican men with college degrees.

Elizabeth Warren, “Wealth Tax.” The Senator from Massachusetts has spent less on TV than anyone else polling in double digits, and her campaign plunked down less than $1,000 to run this spot, in conjunction with her Bloomberg TV interview. It’s her second time with this gimmick; previously, she bought time on CNBC to highlight criticism of the wealth tax from some of the network’s wealthy guests.

And 3 more drop out…

Democrat Steve Bullock ends struggling presidential campaign.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock announced Monday that he’s ending his Democratic presidential campaign, saying it’s become clear that he won’t have a shot at being his party’s nominee. The two-term governor and former state attorney general tried to make the case that he was the best bet to beat President Donald Trump because he was the only Democratic candidate to win in a state that Trump won in 2016. But he got a late start, announcing his candidacy in May and joining nearly two dozen other Democratic candidates competing for attention and campaign donations. “While there were many obstacles we could not have anticipated when entering this race, it has become clear that in this moment, I won’t be able to break through to the top tier of this still-crowded field of candidates,” Bullock said in a statement. The governor said that he ran to win back places Democrats have lost and end the influence of “dark money” in politics. Those concerns have not changed, he said, but he leaves the race “filled with gratitude and optimism, inspired and energized by the good people I’ve had the privilege of meeting over the course of the campaign.”

Democrat Joe Sestak drops his long-shot presidential bid.

Kamala Harris ending presidential bid
California Sen. Kamala Harris is suspending her presidential bid on Tuesday, according to a campaign aide.