Warren has made it clear that the motivation behind her tax is not primarily economic; she thinks that the levels of inequality in this country are now damaging democracy. Is she right?
On its face, she definitely has a case. Today, as a result of two unenlightened Supreme Court decisions equating campaign funds with free speech and some ongoing sabotage of the electoral regulation system by the GOP, you have a flood of unaccountable money in the process and the phenomenon of self-financing campaigns. In addition, you have national campaigns that are kept alive solely by sugar daddies like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess. It is not unreasonable to view this as a threat to the system.
On the other hand, billionaires don’t have a very good record of actually winning elections. Donald Trump was outspent in 2016 by Hillary Clinton. Santorum and Gingrich didn’t win, in spite of the best efforts of their patrons, in 2012. Rick Scott would appear to be an exception, but his margin of victory last year was the same as DeSantis’, which suggests that his spending didn’t really make much of a difference in the long run.
My conclusions are as follows:
- There are plenty of billionaires in America, and some of them are liberals. The likelihood that one of them, or a very small number, can dominate politics is consequently pretty minimal. Madison’s view of the role of factions in large countries is relevant here.
- You could argue that one of the positive elements of our intense partisan divide is that campaign money doesn’t matter much in national elections, because most of the voters simply can’t be reached by commercials.
- I think money really comes into play in two situations, neither of which can be touched by the Warren tax. First, large corporations can afford to pay lobbyists to tweak legislation and regulations to get what they want; second, politicians of both parties are more sympathetic to the concerns of people of their own class than to the poor. There really isn’t an obvious way to address these concerns; certainly, the Warren tax won’t.
And so, like the economic case against the tax, I consider the political case for it to be unproven.