When it comes to keeping up with the Joneses, Daniel Snyder continues to fall short. And the competition regarding which man has the biggest five-letter thing (yacht, or otherwise) has caught the attention of one of the umpteen candidates for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 2020.
Elizabeth Warren has taken to Twitter to call out the Washington owner for his purchase of a very big boat.
“This billionaire NFL owner just paid $100M for a ‘superyacht’ with its own iMax theater,” Warren said. “I’m pretty sure he can pay my new #UltraMillionaireTax to help the millions of yacht-less Americans struggling with student loan debt.”
The Senator from Massachusetts would surely feel the same way about the new superyacht purchased by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, whose new boat cost a whopping $250 million.
Warren wants, on top of all other taxes, a two-percent surcharge to be imposed on personal fortunes of $50 million or more, with the number moving to three percent at $1 billion. Warren recently tried to justify the plan in an appearance on MSNBC, essentially arguing that someone with $50 million in the bank and $50,000 in annual income pays the same amount of taxes as someone with $50 in the bank and $50,000 in annual income. But anyone with a fortune of $50 million and an interest rate of only three percent (someone with $50 million can do much better than that) has an income of $1.5 million per year, and pays the taxes on it.
Although I’ll never have $50 million much less $1 billion (but I’d would welcome either development), the idea of being taxed at every step of the earning process and then to be taxed again on the accumulated net income on which taxes have already been paid seems unfair, no matter how much money someone acquires. And if the argument is (as it appears to be) that much of those fortunes are held not by the people who earned the money but their descendants, the estate tax should take care of that concern.
Of course, none of this will matter as candidates in an already crowded field will try to find a foothold in the hopes of emerging as the eventual challenger to the incumbent Commander-in-Chief. Promising to pull a Robin Hood on the ultra-rich could be the thing that carries the day, even if it forces Snyder and/or Jones to change the name of their boats to the Maid Marian.