Yeah I was wondering if “smart as the devil” wasn’t quite the compliment the press assumed it was
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The Feds, man. The Feds. States can get all up in your bidness.
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I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to see when I google “wealth tax” that there are lawyers who argue that rich people can’t have their wealth taxed. I was also pleased to see that the Founding Fathers™ themselves thought otherwise:
“Other legal scholars have argued that a wealth tax does not represent a direct tax and that such a tax could be implemented in the United States without a constitutional amendment. In a lengthy essay from 2018, authors in the Indiana Journal of Law argued that “… the belief that the U.S. Constitution effectively makes a national wealth tax impossible … is wrong.” The authors noted that in the 1796 Supreme Court decision for Hylton v. United States, Supreme Court justices who had personally taken part in the creation of the U.S. Constitution “unanimously rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of an annual tax on carriages, a tax akin to a national wealth tax in that it taxed a luxury property.” However, Alexander Hamilton, who supported the carriage tax, told the Supreme Court that it was constitutional because it was an “excise tax”, not a direct tax.”
Yeah, I’m willing to go with the Founding Fathers on this one…
Source:
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Re CRT:
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That would still depend very much on how “income” and “wealth” were defined. Simple progressive tax rates on personal earned income were considered constitutional from the beginning; in fact the income tax was promoted as a tax on the rich, with a threshold that exempted ordinary laborers and clerks and such. The hyper-rich use special trusts, offshore properties, etc to avoid taxes on much of their income, whether earned salary or shareholder dividends or capital gains from selling stock. The same problem would deepen if there were a true wealth tax, or (as you suggest) a wealth-based threshold for tax rates.
A simpler scheme would be to throw out all the “investment incentive” tax breaks, and make all income, regardless of how acquired, part of your taxable Gross Income. Personal effort wages, farm sales, dividends (except from government paper sold as tax-free), LLC revenue for its sole proprietor, property rents, stock profits, whatever. Just no longer exempting all that (basically unearned) investment money from the full rate a self-made shopowner would pay: that alone would reduce inequality by hundreds of billions a year.
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It’s only constitutional if you can get 5 members of the supreme court to agree with you. I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.
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Get the rules changed and nominate fifteen Justices. Then maybe five will agree with you.
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Different rules for Democrats and especially Democratic women.
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TFG’s plot for the permanent Democratic Majority is coming together.
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Hey, I got some of the guys who wrote the damned Constitution to agree with me! Who you going to listen to, Keggers or Alexander Hamilton? 
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Yes! What gets defined as “income,” is entirely political, and what gets defined as “income” is everything in this discussion.
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Wouldn’t it be luvverly if, say, 10% or so of the MAGATs actually stayed at home and pouted, just to pwn us Dems???
Dunno about you, but I would be delighted to be pwned like that. In fact, I am begging to be pwned likes that.
C’mon, MAGAts, pwn me!
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Shit rolling downhill
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Scorpions will sting every time.
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The shift between Laundrie and Baldwin on the news is virtually seamless.
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