Democrats pivot from ‘war on poverty’ to ‘war on prosperity’

On April 24, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson strode up to a ramshackle house in Inez, Kentucky, and announced to the invited reporters that, “I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.” That war consumed well over $20 trillion, yet poverty rates (as measured by the government) barely budged. Even that shack in Inez, Kentucky, looks about the same now as it did 55 years ago.

Today, the Democratic Party’s vanguard is focused on a new war – against prosperity. Whereas the war on poverty aimed to lift people up, the mood of the Democrats’ new war on prosperity is to pull people down. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., rail against the “rich and powerful” despite being rich and powerful themselves. To them, the risk-taking and success that define the American Dream are economic vices that government must eradicate.

This isn’t just a war of words. Democrats are unveiling muscular new policies designed to crush successful companies and tear down the prosperous. For example, Democrats are jumping on the bandwagon to dismantle America’s leading tech companies. That would be a big boost to foreign competitors like Samsung and Alibaba, but it’s hard to see how American workers employed by these companies (not to mention consumers) would benefit.

Democrats have also declared war on America’s financial markets. When Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., called for raising taxes on capital gains, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., upped the ante by introducing a plan to tax even unrealized capital gains – eliminating any incentive for long-term investing. Warren wants to put business leaders in prison for their companies’ regulatory lapses, even for mere negligence rather than criminal behavior. Risk-taking and innovation, so important to the vitality of our financial markets, would dry up – choking our economy.

The Democrats’ greatest passion, however, is for confiscating wealth from those who have a lot of it. Even though the top one percent pays more in taxes than the bottom ninety percent combined, Democrats want them to pay much, much more. Warren and Beto O’Rourke would impose a first-ever “wealth tax” on personal fortunes above $50 million. Whatever the government didn’t take from the wealthy while they were alive would be ransacked by a new 77 percent death tax pushed by Sanders, hitting family farmers and capital-intensive small businesses the hardest.