'Total Bulls**t": The Left Has Plans for Seizing and Spending Elon Musk's Money

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File

I wrote about Jimmy Kimmel's monologue earlier but that was just the first fruits of a bumper crop of left-wing hate. Everyone on the left is now offering Elon advice on how to spend his money (money which he literally can't spend) and quite a few people are just demonizing him as evil for being rich. I anticipated all of this yesterday but I might as well document some of it for posterity here.

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Rep. Jayapal called the news "total bulls**t" and called for a wealth tax.

Rep. Ro Khanna, who is currently supporting two different billionaire wealth taxes, suggested spending the money on free college and cheap daycare.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a video calling for a wealth tax and repeated a bunch of retread lies about how little billionaires pay in taxes.

Others were pushing the same lie.

The line about Bezos paying less in taxes than a schoolteacher is one that President Biden repeated often. He was repeatedly fact-checked for it, but ignored the fact checks and kept saying it anyway.

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“But no billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher or a firefighter,” Biden said in his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, calling on Congress to “pass my proposal for the billionaire minimum tax.”...

Biden’s statements refer to a White House economic analysis that included earnings on unsold stock as income. After factoring in this change in wealth, the analysis estimated the average federal individual income tax rate for the 400 wealthiest families was 8.2%, based on the years 2010 to 2018...

But the current tax system does not tax earnings on assets, such as stock, until that asset is sold, at which point they are subject to capital gains taxes. Until stocks and assets are sold, any earnings are referred to as “unrealized” gains.

So, do many billionaires pay lower tax rates than schoolteachers and the other occupations Biden mentions? “Yes, if you count the unrealized gains, which we don’t normally count” for federal income tax purposes, Steven M. Rosenthal, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us in an interview.

Biden’s meaning is likely not clear to many in his audiences.

Biden was lying and so is Sen. Warren. Even the benighted Politifact got this one right. But let's move on. 

Activist Amy Siskind is channeling John Lennon.

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Graham Platner wants to make sure no one else succeeds as much as Musk. He didn't specify how which, given his tattoo, ought to worry some people.

This guy, who is apparently quite well off, just wanted everyone to know that he would be generous if he had all of Elon's money.

Many of these people pretend that Musk has a big vault full of cash or maybe a checking account that has a $1,000,000,000,000 balance. What they won't acknowledge is that the money is almost entirely tied up in his ownership of companies he is still running. It's literally stock. 

Unlike, MacKenzie Scott who got $36 billion when she divorced Jeff Bezos and was the CEO of nothing, Musk can't just cash out and start giving away money. I'm not sure if any of these people understand that. They only way he could spend a trillion dollars is to abandon and crash his own companies.

Moving on. Some people just wanted to do some woke scolding.

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The idea that we're "doing nothing" about the homeless is pretty spectacularly ignorant. California spends $1.5 billion per year on homelessness and that's just at the state level. LA county spends another $1 billion per year. San Francisco spends about the same. New York City's homeless services budget is $3.5 billion per year. If we're doing nothing we should take back all that money.

Speaking of California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is saying Musk proves the system is rigged.

Do you hate Elon? You do, right?

Why should anyone pay for anything if there are billionaires and trillionaires in the world?

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There's a very simple answer. How much was the federal budget deficit last year? It was substantially more than all of Musk's wealth, as it was the year before and the year before that, etc. No Democrat is talking about that. They just want to talk about taking Musk's money so they can spend more on a whole bunch of new things.

Anyway, there's a lot more of this out there now. I just wanted to highlight some of the reactions on the left. The left is going to keep stoking this ignorant outrage. I hope Elon's security is ready for a new wave of death threats from people who are inspired by this.

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