Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Confiscation Tax Would “Redistribute” 2.75 Trillion Dollars Over 10 Years
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Elizabeth Warren is making it exceedingly clear that she is a socialist, and that is quite frightening considering the fact that she could potentially become our next president.
Unless some really big name unexpectedly enters the race, there is a decent chance that Elizabeth Warren could win the Democratic nomination in 2020. And if she ultimately won the general election, the Democrats would likely have control of both the House and the Senate during her first two years in the White House as well. So that means that the proposal that you are about to read about could actually become law in the not too distant future.
After AOC’s proposal to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent received so much favorable attention, it was just a matter of time before Democratic presidential candidates started jumping on the “soak the rich” bandwagon, and the first one to strike was Elizabeth Warren.
When she announced her new proposal on Twitter, she dubbed it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”…
We need structural change. That’s why I’m proposing something brand new – an annual tax on the wealth of the richest Americans. I’m calling it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” & it applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50M.
It would be bad enough if this was just a one-time tax on wealth.
But it isn’t.
Please note the use of the word “annual” in Warren’s tweet. That means that the rich would keep getting hit with this tax year after year after year.
Those with more than 50 million dollars in assets would pay a 2 percent tax each year, and those with more than a billion dollars in assets would pay 3 percent each year…
The Post reported that Warren has been advised by Saez and Gabriel Zucman, left-leaning economists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, on a deal that would levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with $50 million-plus in assets. For Americans with assets above $1 billion, that tax rate would increase to 3 percent.
The newspaper, citing a person familiar with the plan, reported that Warren’s plan would try to counter tax evasion by boosting funding for the IRS, and by levying a one-time tax penalty on people with more than $50 million who try to renounce their U.S. citizenship. It would also require that a certain number of people who pay the wealth tax be subject to annual audits, the Post reported.
3 percent may not sound like a lot to many of you. But over the course of a couple of decades many families could have their fortunes almost completely wiped out by this wealth confiscation tax.
According to economist Emmanuel Saez, this new tax would be imposed upon approximately 75,000 families and would raise 2.75 trillion dollars over 10 years.
Clearly this is a move by Warren to appeal to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I really like how Zero Hedge made this point…
Elizabeth Warren has never been a friend to the wealthy. But in the age of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, merely advocating for “holding the rich accountable” simply doesn’t penetrate like it did back in 2008. And that’s because, on the left flank of the Democratic Party, you’re not really a progressive unless you believe that the existence of billionaires is a policy error.
And surprisingly, there is actually a lot of public support for such a proposal. In fact, a recent Fox News poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support soaking the rich…
Voters support tax increases on families making over $10 million annually by a 46-point margin (70 percent favor-24 percent oppose), and support a hike on those making over $1 million by 36 points (65-29 percent).
There is less support for a broader tax increase: 44 percent favor raising rates on those with income over $250,000, and a small minority, 13 percent, approves of an increase on all Americans.
Of course so much depends on how a survey is worded. For example, I would be willing to bet that a survey would show that well over 50 percent of all Americans would back my proposal to abolish the income tax completely.
Over the coming months, Democratic presidential contenders are going to be continuously trying to one up each other with their promises to tax the rich and give out free stuff. By the end, someone out there may even be promising to give free rides to the Moon to everyone.
But if Elizabeth Warren really wants to be considered a serious contender, she needs to eliminate the ridiculous gaffes that have plagued her in the past. For instance, she recently claimed that we have “two co-equal branches of government”…
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., already has declared that the government has “three chambers of Congress,” the House, the Senate and the presidency.
Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has claimed on Twitter that the government has “two co-equal branches of government, the president of the United States and Congress.”
“The Notorious RBG (Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg) is gonna be ticked off that she’s been forgotten again,” said a post on the Twitter news-aggregating site Twitchy.
And there is certainly no excuse for such a gaffe, because she used to be a law professor.
In the end, it is difficult to understand why so many Americans seem to want to march down the road toward socialism. Because as President Trump has noted, Venezuela has shown us where that road leads…
“We’re looking at Venezuela, it’s a very sad situation,” Trump told reporters. “That was the richest state in all of that area, that’s a big beautiful area, and by far the richest — and now it’s one of the poorest places in the world. That’s what socialism gets you, when they want to raise your taxes to 70 percent.”
He added: “You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been watching our opponents — our future opponents talk about 70 percent. No. 1, they can’t do it for 70 percent, it’s got to be probably twice that number. But, maybe more importantly what happens is you really have to study what’s happened to Venezuela. It’s a very, very sad situation.”
Unfortunately, political proposals don’t have to actually make sense, and right now Elizabeth Warren is doing all that she can to win the progressive vote.
Ocasio-Cortez ‘predicts’ end of the world in 12 years, cue Twitter mockery
While she intended to express a sense of urgency, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s declaration of impending apocalypse and puzzling comparison between climate change and WWII mostly incited confusion and laughter online.
Shortly before launching the first assault in the war against global warming (eating ice-cream with comedian Stephen Colbert), the 29-year-old lawmaker made her apocalyptic prediction. She announced that the end is nigh in her interview with journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on Monday night at a forum honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change’,” the doomsaying congresswoman revealed in her rather distinctive oratorical tone.
To prevent the coming end-times, she called millennials and members of Gen-Z into battle with her inspiring words: “And, like, this is the war – this is our World War II.”
Twitter users responded with levels of mockery scaled to the congresswoman’s wildly hyperbolic warning.
Others were baffled by Ocasio-Cortez’s historical analogy, or imagined a war against an ecological phenomenon a bit too literally.
But some commenters even saw the bright side of the apocalyptic proclamation.
Mockery aside, Ocasio-Cortez’s seemingly oddly specific number is sourced in a report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October last year. Well not quite predicting the end of the world, the report did suggest dire consequences in a dozen years if serious action is not taken to fight global warming.
The freshman lawmaker doubled down on her statements on Twitter, emphasizing that climate change is an “existential threat” and chalking up criticism to generational differences.
However, more than one Twitter user noticed that Ocasio-Cortez’s words were rather reminiscent of the dire warnings issued by Al Gore, ironically almost exactly 12 years ago. Gore was slightly more pessimistic when he predicted a global emergency within ten years in his 2006 film “An inconvenient truth”; his climate-catastrophe is currently about 3 years overdue.
Just in case her predictions do turn out to have some basis in reality, a new website has launched featuring a convenient timer to help us plan our few remaining years.
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OCASIO-CORTEZ: Set To Party With Hollywood At Sundance… Medicare, free tuition for all! And she’s just getting started…
By
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might not have seen eye to eye with Joseph Overton, the late free-market advocate. But she has a firm grasp of the concept for which he is best known: the Overton Window. The term refers to the range of ideas that are at any given time considered worthy of public discussion. Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left.
Ocasio-Cortez, the mediagenic 29-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., is the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In an appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by saying the program would require raising taxes. “There’s an element, yeah, where people are going to have to start paying their fair share,” she replied. Asked for specifics, she said, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”
Seventy percent! For perspective, the top rate under the tax law that passed in December 2017 is 37 percent. And now, suddenly, a number so extreme that no one in polite society dared utter it became a focal point of debate. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans—she has 2.4 million followers on Twitter alone—loved it. Some pundits dug up economic research defending rates in the 70 percent range. Others pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez was actually lowballing the historical comparison: Top rates were 90 percent or higher as recently as the 1960s. Defenders of low tax rates heaped abuse on her, which backfired on them by inflaming her supporters.
What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that getting an idea talked about, even unfavorably, is a necessary, if insufficient, step on the path to adoption. (President Trump also gets this.) “It’s the easiest thing to say, ‘No, we can’t change anything,’ ” says Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently retired from Columbia University. “Most of the big ideas in American history started among radical groups who were told, ‘No, you’re never going to be able to achieve that.’ ” Foner sees parallels between the strategies of today’s left-leaning Democrats and the radical Republicans who fought slavery before the Civil War, “which was put out an agenda, be aware that you can’t just accomplish it all at once, obviously, but change the political discourse by pushing your agenda and then work with those who are willing to do some of it.”
Ocasio-Cortez was actually less radical than she could have been on 60 Minutes. She passed up the opportunity to move the Overton Window on another of her pet issues: budget deficits. She adheres to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory that’s catching on among young, left-leaning politicians and older policymakers alike.
Its counterintuitive core idea is that deficits don’t matter if you borrow in your own currency, just as long as they don’t cause inflation. Unless the economy is at risk of overheating, MMTers say, paying for a new government program doesn’t require cutting another or raising taxes.
Ocasio-Cortez could have said, “No, Anderson, we wouldn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the Green New Deal. But I want to raise taxes anyway, because I believe in redistributing money from the rich to the poor.” That really would have lit up the internet. Randall Wray, an MMT theorist who’s a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote in an email that he was “a bit disappointed” that Ocasio-Cortez connected tax hikes to the Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, another MMT theorist and Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser during his race for the Democratic nomination in 2016, says she thinks reducing inequality is the real reason Ocasio-Cortez favors higher rates on the rich: “It’s kind of a recognition that levels of income and wealth inequality parallel those of the 1920s.”
Whatever the particulars, Ocasio-Cortez wants to raise tax rates—by a lot. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Democrats have been almost as allergic as Republicans to raising taxes. Hillary Clinton didn’t advocate increasing rates on top incomes at all during her 2016 presidential campaign. Even Sanders, that wild socialist from Vermont, dared propose a top rate of only 52 percent when he ran for president.
But with Ocasio-Cortez, antitax conservatives immediately sensed that a taboo was being broken, that a crack has opened up in the dam they’d spent decades building and reinforcing. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who in 1986 devised the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge that commits signers to vote against any net increases in taxes, on Twitter likened her proposal to slavery. “Slavery is when your owner takes 100% of your production. Democrat congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez wants 70% (according to CNN) What is the word for 70% expropriation?” he tweeted.
Norquist now says he remains confident that tax rates won’t rise to 70 percent, because “it’s such a bad idea.” In fact, he says he thinks Democrats are hurting only themselves by entertaining it. Ocasio-Cortez, he says, is a “pied piper” leading her party to its demise. It’s not at all clear, though, that higher taxes on the rich are a losing issue for Democrats. A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 found that 59 percent of registered voters supported the idea of raising the top rate to 70 percent. That included 45 percent of Republican voters. Thanks perhaps to the presidential campaign of Sanders, who like Ocasio-Cortez calls himself a democratic socialist, even “socialism” is no longer a dirty word: Gallup reported in August that 57 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic had a positive view of socialism, while only 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism.
What would a 70 percent top tax rate do to the U.S. economy and businesses? The rap on high rates is that they discourage work and promote wasteful tax-sheltering. Even many economists who think the rich pay too little say the better solution is to eliminate loopholes—subjecting more income to taxation rather than taxing a narrow base at a high rate.
Norquist argues that a 70 percent top rate would trigger an exodus of high-earning individuals from the U.S., saying that the last time U.S. rates were that high, they were also high in other nations, reducing the incentive to move. The Tax Foundation, a right-of-center think tank, said on Jan. 14 that a 70 percent top rate on ordinary income (not capital gains) exceeding $10 million “would not raise much revenue.” “Not much revenue” in this case means an estimated $189 billion in total over 10 years—or $292 billion before accounting for the likelihood that people in that tax bracket would work less and invest less in their noncorporate businesses.
On the other hand, economists supportive of Ocasio-Cortez were quick to point out that Denmark has among the world’s highest living standards despite a 56.5 percent tax rate on incomes above about $80,000 a year, a far lower threshold than her $10 million. A 2011 paper by Nobel laureate Peter Diamond of MIT and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley advocated top total tax rates (federal plus state) for the richest Americans of 73 percent on ordinary income (again, not capital gains). They assumed that an extra dollar of income for someone in that bracket has very little value in comparison to a dollar received by a lower-income person. Critics of their research have said Diamond and Saez treat the rich as sheep to be shorn and underestimate how much high tax rates would discourage people from getting advanced degrees or starting businesses. Diamond rejects the criticism, cites the need for more public investment, and says, “I’m perfectly comfortable” with Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent rate.
One thing that most people don’t know about Ocasio-Cortez is that she was a science nerd in high school in Westchester County, N.Y. In 2007, out of almost 1,500 students from 46 countries competing in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, she was one of four second-place winners in the microbiology category. (Her research was on the effect of antioxidants on roundworms.) It’s a biographical detail that adds another dimension to the story of a young woman born in the Bronx to parents of Puerto Rican descent who became the first in her family to attend college. While she was away at school her father died, pushing the family to the brink of financial ruin. “When you come from a working-class background, it often feels like you’re just one disaster away from everything falling apart,” she said in an Instagram video about a year ago.
Like former President Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez became a community organizer after graduating from college, in 2011, and supported herself as a waitress and bartender. She worked for Sanders’s campaign in 2016. After that, things happened fast. She ran for the Democratic nomination in her Bronx-Queens congressional district and upset Joe Crowley. Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Crowley had been seen as a candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. He outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18 to 1 and had endorsements from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and both New York senators. She won huge.
No one shifts the Overton Window on any subject without strong communications skills, and Ocasio-Cortez is ninja-level in that department. She thrills supporters by going after critics hard on social media, which she uses the way an older generation used street rallies. “I’m a firm believer that organizing never stops,” she told Cooper in the 60 Minutes interview. One of her first acts after her election was to visit the office of Pelosi—not to seek her blessing but to support climate change activists who were occupying the soon-to-be speaker’s office. Now Ocasio-Cortez works two doors away from Pelosi—but not for her. She’s floated the idea of creating a progressive caucus among the Democrats, modeling it on the powerful Freedom Caucus on the right. Among her allies are new members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali-American elected to Congress; New Mexico’s Deb Haaland, one of the first American Indian women elected to Congress; and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American in Congress.
“This is a movement; this is not me,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video last year.
Both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are social media virtuosos. They excel at turning back attacks on their credibility. Attempts to challenge them on facts come across to their supporters as mean-spirited and unfair—the knee-jerk reaction of an establishment trying to suppress outside voices. So it was when Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly said on social media last year that the Pentagon had lost track of $21 trillion in funds, a figure that was about 30 times the Department of Defense’s annual budget. Unlike Trump, she corrects her mistakes. “The thing that’s hard is that you’re supposed to be perfect all the time on every issue and every thing,” she said on Instagram last year.
Implicit in that statement: Ocasio-Cortez has plenty more Overton Windows to shift and no intention of slowing down for the critics. Aside from the Green New Deal and higher taxes on the rich, she favors Medicare for all, a federal guarantee of a job, abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, and tuition-free college or trade school. She also wants to slash military spending, ban assault weapons, and bring back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks.
That may all sound like tail risk to American businesses, which have been enjoying deregulation under Trump. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, says, “This is the kind of plan where you can’t go to Wall Street executives first to try to get them to buy into it. You gotta show ’em.”
The question is whether she’ll be able to show them, or anyone. A week after Ocasio-Cortez came to Washington, fellow Democrats complained that she was disruptive and not a team player. Chief among her sins: threatening to back the primary opponents of members of Congress who aren’t liberal enough for her. “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat, told Politico. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.”
To pass any of their initiatives, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies will have to defeat the proven Republican strategy of using budget deficits as a justification for opposing new spending. That’s where Modern Monetary Theory comes in. It says a government can spend money without raising taxes—indeed, without even borrowing from the public via bonds. The government simply creates new money to pay its bills. The only constraint on spending under MMT is that the government could use up too much of the nation’s productive capacity, which would result in high inflation. As long as inflation remains low, as it is now, deficits are no problem. The usual reply from other economists is that even a nation that owes debt in its own currency can suffer a crisis if investors lose faith in its ability to service the debt without resorting to the printing press.
One precinct where deficits still matter, and MMT most certainly does not, is the office of House Speaker Pelosi. On Jan. 3, under Pelosi’s direction, the House passed a set of rules including pay-as-you-go, which requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts. PAYGO, as it’s known, is contrary to the spirit of MMT and hamstrings liberal Democrats by making most of their spending initiatives impossible. Ocasio-Cortez was one of only three Democrats to oppose the provision, along with Ro Khanna of California and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
Ocasio-Cortez had another setback when she was passed over for a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. But she recovered nicely by getting a seat along with other progressives on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, headed by Maxine Waters of California. Carolyn Maloney, a fellow New York Democrat, says, “I was once that young woman who others tried to rein in. I certainly don’t believe in doing that to anyone else. Representative Ocasio-Cortez is bringing new energy and a new approach, and we should all embrace that.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s disregard for political niceties is both her strongest quality as an activist and potentially her Achilles’ heel as a representative. She shows no sign of dialing back. One way or another, says Kelton, the economic adviser, “the conversation is shifting. The space is opening up.” —With Allison McCartney
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA LECTURER SAYS “FIGHTING WHITE PEOPLE IS A SKILL”
“You have to get used to fighting white people”
JANUARY 17, 2019
A philosophy lecturer at the University of Georgia was accused of advocating racial violence after he tweeted “fighting white people is a skill”.
“Fighting White people is a skill. Really, it’s one reason I’m in support of integrated schools. You have to get used to fighting White people. It takes practice,” tweeted Irami Osei-Frimpong, who is listed on the official University of Georgia website under the Department of Philosophy.
Osei-Frimpong, who goes by the name ‘The Funky Academic’, also quoted Bobby E. Wright, a political activist who once said, “Blacks kill Blacks because they have never been trained to kill Whites.”
One respondent on Twitter accused of “advocating racial violence against whites”.
“It is interesting that you believe this. Black people in white neighborhoods tend assimilate with white people, and despise people who think like you,” commented another user.
It is unclear why Osei-Frimpong advocates “fighting white people,” but a review of his teaching style on the RateMyProfessors website reveals one student’s opinion that, “If you are sensitive to criticism of white people, you will not enjoy his lectures.”
Osei-Frimpong’s blog features writing in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, while one entry also discusses how he was suspended by Facebook for 30 days for a post in which he called for a “political revolution” and said he was a fan of “white people writing checks out of guilt.”
Osei-Frimpong’s Facebook page also reveals his support for Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
Gaetz: Next Dem Prez Will Use National Emergency To Build Trans Bathrooms
January 11, 2019 10:17 am
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said that he doesn’t want President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency to fund the wall because of the precedent it would set for the next Democratic President, according to a Thursday Wall Street Journal report.
“I don’t want the next national emergency to be that some Democrat President says we have to build transgender bathrooms in every elementary school in America,” Gaetz said.
Trump has been teasing the decision for days, saying Thursday that he “can’t imagine any reason” not to declare a national emergency.
Poll: Democrats Against Pulling Troops Out Of Syria, Afghanistan
By Chris Menahan
A new poll from Morning Consult/Politico found the majority of Democrats are against President Trump’s move to pull out of Syria and also oppose Trump pulling half our troops out of Afghanistan.
On the flip side, Republicans overwhelmingly favor both pulling out of Syria and drawing down troops from Afghanistan.
On the religious front, non-evangelical Catholics were the most supportive of pulling out of Syria (64%/24%) while Jews were the most opposed (34%/52%).
Though “conservative” Erick Erickson suggested last month that our soldiers were ready to stage a coup to overthrow president Trump in order to keep the war in Syria going, the poll found military households were also overwhelmingly in favor of ending the war (55%/35%).
Most Democrats were against the war in Syria in 2017 before the latest media blitz ordered them to support it:
As I reported earlier this week, over the past two years neocons have begun shifting over to the Democratic Party.
MSBNC’s Ari Melber recently hailed “woke Bill Kristol”:
MSNBC also recently celebrated that the “military-industrial complex is now run by women”— as well as the CIA.
The Democratic Party has become the party of war.
Democrats Preview Response to Trump Oval Office Speech: ‘There Is No National Emergency on the Southern Border’
By Joel B. Pollak
Democrats have already dropped hints of what their response to President Donald Trump’s address Tuesday evening from the Oval Office on the border crisis will be.
The networks have granted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) airtime to respond. Their message will be that there is no crisis that merits building a barrier on the border. The only crisis, to them, is the partial government shutdown.
As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said last week, responding to the suggestion Trump may declare an emergency so he can order the military to build the barrier: “There is no national emergency on the southern border.” He described the idea as “stealing resources from the Defense Department.”
The real solution to what he called the “complex issues at our southern border” — which are not an emergency, mind you — is “comprehensive immigration reform.”
The idea that there is no crisis at the border will be a tough sell, especially as Democrats and the media described the situation as a crisis last summer, when the Trump administration started enforcing its “zero tolerance” policy toward illegal crossings that resulted — thanks to existing rules dating to the Obama administration — in children being separated from adults. Pelosi even questioned “why there aren’t uprisings all over the country” about it.
To Democrats, the only “crisis” — aside from the government being partially closed for two weeks — results from the enforcement of existing laws at the border. To resolve that “crisis,” they want to pass more laws — which, they insist, include provisions for “border security,” though they do not want to enforce the laws already on the books.
Here are some other arguments Democrats will likely use, based on their statements over the past several days.
1. Trump is a liar. “I expect the president to lie to the American people,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee, during a visit to the border yesterday. (Nadler added: “There’s no security crisis at the border.”) Nadler echoed the CNN line, which is that the president’s speeches should not enjoy live coverage because he might say inaccurate things — a problem journalists never had with President Barack Obama.
2. Border walls and fences do not work. This is another weak argument, since many House and Senate Democrats — including Schumer — voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Other variants of this argument is that a wall would be “immoral” (Pelosi) and “racist” (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)). However, given examples of walls or fences to stop migrants in the European Union, Israel, and even Botswana, these arguments are also easily defeated.
3. Trump’s $5 billion proposal is wasteful. This is a tough argument to sustain after Democrats’ own proposals to end the partial shutdown and re-open the government. Democrats want “over $12 billion more in foreign aid than the Trump administration requested,” according to Breitbart News’ Rebecca Mansour. Democrats also asked for a combined $10 billion in extra funding for the United Nations and other supposed priorities. $5 billion is nothing.
4. Mexico should be paying for it. Democrats have been taking potshots at the president for months by reminding him of his refrain from the campaign trail in 2016. Trump has argued that Mexico is paying for the wall through its concessions on trade. But the U.S. could also tax remittances Mexican workers in the U.S. send home, or raise fees for crossing the border. There are many ways to collect in future, if needed; what the wall needs is a down payment.
5. Government shutdowns are wrong. This used to be a winning argument for Democrats — until they shut down the government themselves last year in an effort to force President Trump and the Republicans to legalize the so-called “Dreamers,” i.e. illegal aliens brought to the country as minors. The contrast also works in favor of Trump: Democrats shut down the government to protect illegal aliens, while the president is doing so to protect Americans.
The fact is that the Democrats’ best and only case against the border wall is that Trump proposed it. They know if he fails to deliver on his core campaign promise, he will lose his voter base. And they know if he buckles and re-opens the government without the funding he wants, they can walk all over him for the next two years.
What they may not realize is those reasons also make him stronger: he cannot compromise, therefore he has the advantage.
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