The report quotes Warren’s tax advisors Saez and Gabriel Zucman, also a progressive economist affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.
Expect to hear a lot from Saez and Zucman—the new media darlings of the progressive left—who published an article in the New York Times on Tuesday defending Ocasio-Cortez's proposal: “An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power. Although many policies can help address it, progressive income taxation is the fairest and most potent of them all," they wrote.
Of course, tax-the-rich policies are not a new clarion call from political candidates. Even Trump floated a wealth tax in 1999 as he explored a presidential bid as a Reform Party nominee. Trump's plan would have imposed a one-time 14.25 percent tax on individuals and trusts worth more than $10 million, newspapers at the time reported.
The announcement has not escaped the notice of affluent investors and executives, some of whom have been meeting this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
One Davos attendee Scott Minerd, global chief investment officer of $265 billion Guggenheim Partners, said he expects the tax proposals to “gain momentum” as we get closer to the 2020 elections.
Minerd is right. It’s highly unlikely that the divided Congress and complete paralysis that has seized the nation’s capital will be able to produce a new tax in the next two years. The real test of a wealth tax will come heading into 2020 when the race for the presidency and key House and Senate seats can decide the future of the American tax system for years to come.
Parts of this article were provided by Bloomberg News.