As I understand it, Elizabeth Warren is proposing a 2% tax on wealth per household that exceeds $50 million. This seems to be pretty much based upon what Thomas Piketty proposed in his book, Wealth in the 21st Century, at least if I’m remembering the book correctly.
I certainly agree with Elizabeth Warren that the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of households is a very big problem in this country, and I might well support such a proposal if we were writing on a clean constitutional slate, but obviously we’re not. The problem is that I can’t come up with an argument for the constitutionality of such a tax under Article I, Section 9, Clause 4, that even comes close to passing the “straight face test.” For the same reason that we needed the 16th Amendment to permit the income tax, it seems to me that there would have to be a constitutional amendment to permit a wealth tax, and good luck on getting THAT amendment enacted, at least any time that Elizabeth Warren would still be in office.
Has anyone seen a legal analysis of the constitutionality of the “wealth tax” proposal? Does anybody have a plausible argument for the constitutionality of such a proposal?
This is a very serious question, because I’m very impressed by Elizabeth Warren (as well as several others of our candidates), and would love to hear about a convincing argument that her proposal even might be constitutional in the absence of a constitutional amendment.