Warrens Wealth Tax Would Cost Her Own Billionaire Backers $430 Million A Year – Forbes

Elizabeth Warren at a town hall event in Norfolk, Virginia.

Three billionaires donated $2,800 each to Elizabeth Warrens campaign, federal filings show, in what may prove to be the worst financial investment of all time. If Warren gets elected and can implement her controversial wealth tax plan, the three tycoonsCraigslist founder Craig Newmark, venture capitalist Chris Sacca and cofounder of industrial conglomerate Danaher Steven Raleswould owe a collective $430 million a year.

Warren has a lot of plansoffering universal child care, student debt forgiveness and Medicare for alland she wants to pay for them, in part, by taxing billionaires. After initially proposing a 3% tax on all fortunes over $1 billion, she doubled the proposed levy to 6% last week, explaining that the additional tax revenue would go toward expanding Medicare. Under the plan, billionaires would pay nothing on their first $50 million, 2% on their next $950 million and 6% on everything over a billion.

On Thursday, after inviting Bill Gates via Twitter to an explainer on her tax plan, Warrens campaign shared a calculator for the billionaires showing just how much people like Gates would pay. The online calculator displays how much Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Walmart heir Jim Walton and hedge fund titan Leon Cooperman, who has called Warrens tax plans morally and socially bankrupt, would pay annually.

Since it does not explain how much her own donors would pay, Forbes crunched the numbers. For Sacca, who is worth an estimated $1.1 billion, the new tax would take an extra $25 millionor about as much as it costs to buy a couple of private islands in the Caribbean. For Newmark, worth $1.3 billion or so, the annual bill would hit $37 million, about the price of a used Gulfstream G650 jet. And for Rales, who is worth roughly $6.8 billion, the tally would reach $367 million, more than the value of the presidents interest in Trump Tower.

Still, the billionaires may not mind. Very lucky guy here (who got rich in part thanks to public schools, access to health care, etc.), Sacca tweeted about himself in January, when Warren first announced her plan to create a wealth tax. Weighing in to say that [Warrens] proposal to put a 2-3% annual tax on wealth over $50 million is extremely and radically reasonable.

Details will be everything, he added. Not everyone who is rich is liquid and able to pay cash. Asset valuation is hard. Ownership can be murky. There will be workarounds. And so on. But, the idea of a very modest tax (below expected yields) on accumulating assets, is interesting. Rales and Newmark did not respond to requests for comment.

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Warrens Wealth Tax Would Cost Her Own Billionaire Backers $430 Million A Year - Forbes