With All the Criticism of the Wealth Tax, It Would be Nice to Hear what the 99.9% Think

The wealth taxes Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed continue to provoke the malice of Wall Street, corporate democrats, and now even other Democratic candidates running for president.

As I have written elsewhere (here and here), the intensity of the energy devoted to this criticism, combined with the lack of substance typically informing these critiques, is puzzling because the policies would impact, in the case of Warren’s proposal, only .1 percent of American households. The intensity seems disproportionate to the impact.

Is this outrage on behalf of the 99.9 percent of Americans?

Is the 99.9 percent of Americans voicing these criticisms?

Let’s look at who’s talking:

When Warren surged in the polls in September, CNBC published an article with the headline: “Wall Street Democratic donors warn the party: We’ll sit out, or back Trump, if you nominate Elizabeth Warren.” The article offered this quotation as representative of the widespread opinion among “high-dollar democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community”: “You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump.’”

To whom is this quotation attributed? The reporting tell us: “a senior private equity executive, who spoke on…