Valued subscribers, upon reading that math-challenged deep state politicians look to confiscate some part of your nest eggs with what can only be described as a malevolent tax on the Trump-supporting family's financial gonads, MacDougal sprang into action. Sobered up from that regretful escapade, his first actual constructive thought returned the intrepid blogger back to those calamitous guns-and-butter days of, we'll call it, 1966-1982 when the budgetary shenanigans of Lyndon Johnson and them took us off the rails and the train of state never did get back on track until the Great Ronald Reagan jumped out from your neighborhood silver screen to save the day the way all our real heroes do, with bravado and figurative guns ablazing, and she started chugging properly again.
Now, MacDougal would like to drag you back there with him, probably kicking and screaming if you remember the seventies at all. What would've happened to the old financial gonads if some commie fruitcake had imposed a malevolent wealth tax on Eisenhower-loving families then?
The numbers turn out to be chilling, but we're going to throw them at you anyway. With a 60% rate, over the 1966-1982 period the malevolent wealth tax on an investor's beginning $100 million portfolio would've left its victim with $7.42 on Dec 31, 1982. Let there be no mistake here. That's seven dollars and forty-two cents. A one hundred million dollar net worth becomes seven dollars and forty-two cents the last time fruitcake politicians went crazy bananas with taxpayer money if you toss a malevolent 60% wealth tax in on top of it.
We've got a poopload of appropriate assumptions and methodology behind our conclusions, 1) yearly changes in the year end Dow Jones Industrial Average and 2) taxing values as of those dates prominent among them.
You say 60% is extreme. Is it? MacDougal's father paid a 95% marginal tax rate at one point in the sixties, and he wasn't exactly alone. You say it won't apply to everybody. It won't? Check out early discussions of the income tax. Any income tax. Heck, check out anything politicians do.
Seven dollars and forty-two cents.
At a 50% rate, the malevolent wealth tax leaves our $100 million man with $411.88 at the end of 1982. Let's jump all the way down to 30%. That turns into $175 thou. To someone worth $100 million in 1966, $175 thou in 1982 is the kind of number you jump out of windows over. At 25%, the malevolent wealth tax leaves $608 thou. If you've never had $608 thou, maybe you won't understand this, but the best our $100 million man could say about $608 thou, is "at least I can afford to go out and get a gun over this".
A 15% malevolent wealth tax on an investor holding $100 million in assets as 1966 began would've left him/her/them/whatever with $5.7 mill as 1982 ended, 10% reduces all that wealth to $16 mill, 5% to $43 mill, and 3%, the rate one fruitcake has proposed, drops $100 mill to $62 mill.
Finally, and we promise not to put you through any more of this abuse once this last paragraph is finished, there isn't a sentient investor on the entire planet who isn't expecting a '66-'82 style period of reckoning to occur to somebodies somewhere sometime as a result of the gross financial mismanagement governments across the globe have foisted on their populations in the name of globalism and whatnot since at least 2008, and we are confident that the years chosen to be used above will be proven proper for this analysis at such time.