With Elizabeth Warren aggressively on-the-stump, the truly rich had better hold onto their wallets. Now she’s pitching student-debt cancellation that would be paid-for with a 2% levy on wealth above $50 million and an additional 1% tax on wealth above $1 billion. Is this the greatest idea since sliced bread, or what? Socialists, even brainy ones like Warren, can’t help sounding like morons whenever they talk. But she’s certainly on a winning political track when she emphasizes that the $1.5 trillion the plan would require over the next ten years won’t cost us working stiffs a dime.
Who could resist such an idea, other than a few churlish billionaires already pressed to pay for the Green New Deal, and a handful of old-fashioned economists who have actually read Adam Smith. The great Scottish economist would surely agree with Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler, who noted in a Monday op-ed piece that “socialists like Bernie Sanders love to spend money on ‘free’ education and Medicare for All but have no policies to make money in the first place.”
That is precisely why Warren’s latest soak-the-rich scheme flunks freshman economics: It fails, even, to acknowledge incentives, let alone understand how they produce wealth. It also neglects to consider the bad signal it will send to those who have collectively borrowed more than $1.5 trillion to pay for college, as well as students who might conceivably borrow in the future.
I’d like to think (somewhat naively I admit) that most of us can agree meddling by politicians always ends in tears, regardless of which side of the spectrum the meddling comes from.
But perhaps it’s not such a bad idea letting people at least take turns in shedding those tears, life’s all about striking a balance after all.
Of course the best solution would be to stop the meddling in the first place, but is that really ever going to happen prior to a genuine melt down? … me thinks not.