Ben Nelson, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska who received straight “Fs” on a Citizens for Tax Justice report card in the aughts for his support of George W. Bush’s regressive tax cuts, has a new gig defending the rich from taxes.
He has joined Saving America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE) and taken up its cause of opposing wealth taxes with a new op-ed in the Washington Post.
Nearly three years ago, ITEP said the following about the organization Nelson now speaks for:
“One of the most attention-grabbing anti-tax campaigns at work today is called SAFE, which stands for Saving America’s Family Enterprises. But it might as well mean Saving Aristocrats From Everything given the outfit’s knack for opposing any national proposal to limit special tax advantages that only the wealthy enjoy.
The basic approach of SAFE is to have Democrats who are former elected lawmakers or administration officials convince the public, media, Congress, and even the judiciary that any effort to end special tax breaks for the wealthy will actually harm the non-wealthy.”
Apparently SAFE liked the results of this strategy after it successfully tanked then-President Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized gains left by the wealthy to their heirs. (Notably, SAFE later failed in its scheme to convince the Supreme Court to sharply limit Congress’s taxing powers.)
Nelson’s new op-ed begins by describing the difficulties of farming in his state. Readers not familiar with the tactics of anti-tax leaders and activists might be confused as to what this has to do with wealth taxes, which are always designed to affect only the very wealthy. Nelson himself links to two proposals before Congress, one that does not affect anyone with net worth below $50 million and another with a threshold of $1 billion. How many Nebraska farmers are worth more than $50 million, or more than $1 billion? Nelson does not say, because the answer is probably extremely small, and most Nebraskans are probably not particularly worried about them.
Right now, the federal government imposes something kind of like a wealth tax, but only at the end of a wealthy person’s life, when their estate is taxed. This is a policy that Nelson has, naturally, always opposed.
According to the most recent IRS data, only 2,129 Americans who died in 2019 (only 0.08 percent of those who died that year) left estates large enough to be subject to that tax. Only 319 of those were worth more than $50 million. The combined worth of these 319 estates (which presumably would have been subject to a wealth tax on net worth exceeding $50 million, if one was in effect) was $41.5 billion. And only 3 percent of that amount (only about $1 billion) was farm assets, according to the IRS data.
So, why is Nelson saying a wealth tax affecting those worth more than $50 million (not to mention one affecting those worth more than $1 billion) is somehow a threat to farmers?
That takes us to the next part of his argument, which is even more of a stretch, where he argues:
“Most of the proposed wealth taxes target billionaires, but the government is unlikely to limit itself to such high earners for long. Implementing a wealth tax would require an extensive new administrative bureaucracy. With that infrastructure in place, the temptation to extend the levy to people further down the income ladder would be too great.”
The actual question presented by these proposals is whether extremely wealthy people (billionaires, under most of these proposals) should pay more taxes. Ben Nelson and SAFE know full well that the vast majority of Americans would answer that question with a big fat “yes!”
Nelson and SAFE know that they cannot win a political battle over that question, so they try to change the subject to an imaginary wealth tax on middle-class people, which no one has proposed, which would be impossible to implement, and which no lawmaker would support.
When a tax proposal is being debated, you can often assess the quality of someone’s argument by how much time they spend focusing on people who would not be subject to the tax proposal at all. Ben Nelson’s op-ed, with its focus on farmers and the middle class, earns him yet another “F.”
