President Biden campaigned on reducing wealth inequality (as well as income inequality). Hey, mission accomplished! The four-month stock market slide, the worst for the S&P 500 since 1939, has made a lot of wealthy people a lot less wealthy. Of course, it has made a lot of seniors and middle-income working families with IRAs and pensions a lot less wealthy, too. And that’s a huge problem for Biden and the Democrats.
Are Democrats worried that Apple CEO Tim Cook and many of Apple’s investors are too wealthy? They can stop worrying. Apple’s market capitalization has fallen ab
And you have to think the left is seething that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has enough money and clout to buy Twitter. Tesla and its investors are down too this year, but not that much, about $150 billion.
Had Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) been able to get her wealth tax passed and signed into law last year, wealthy taxpayers who were worth a whole lot more last Dec. 31 would be paying taxes on assets they no longer have. The fact that money has vanished is bad news for the left, but it’s a lot worse news for the U.S. economy. Because it is private sector wealth, not government spending, that drives investment and economic growth.
Of course, what the left really wanted to do was take that money from the rich and hand it out to favored groups, no doubt in the hope the recipients would vote Democrat in November.
As various news stories keep reporting, the left thinks it will get hammered in the coming midterm elections not because the Biden administration has done a terrible job of handling inflation, the pandemic, rising crime and the Afghanistan withdrawal, but because the government hasn’t spent enough money. And paid for that largesse by raising taxes on the rich.
out half-a-trillion dollars since the beginning of the year.
Are Jeff Bezos and investors in Amazon a little too rich? Good news! Amazon’s market capitalization has lost about $750 billion so far this year.
In fairness, Biden doesn’t deserve all the credit – or is it blame? – for reducing wealth inequality. He had help. Democrats passed his American Rescue Plan (ARP), which ladled out nearly $2 trillion, exacerbating the already growing inflation. For example, the ARP passed in March of last year. Inflation that month was 2.6 percent, slightly above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. In March of this year, exactly one year later, inflation was 8.5 percent.