Yes, Vivek Ramaswamy Supports 59% Inheritance Tax
/
Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Does Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy support the “Death Tax?” According to his “fact check” site, he doesn’t. “WRONG. Vivek supports a 12% flat tax across the board, while eliminating cronyist deductions and loopholes.” But like many “fact checkers,” the dishonesty is in how you present the correction.
“Fake news and threatened campaigns will point to Vivek’s second book, Nation of Victims, where Vivek lays out a mathematical calculation on how to fully eliminate the federal income tax, which wasn’t even constitutional for most of its history. Vivek is an intellectual, not a partisan hack, so he explores ideas. Well, sue him for it. If opposition researchers and career politicians want to misquote his book, they might want to consider doing something they’d never considered: read the whole book, actually. It’s on sale for $15 right now on Amazon, 😉.”
Well, I did purchase Ramaswamy’s book (for $15.99 on Amazon). I think we all know if you quote Ramaswamy, even word-for-word, he’ll just say it was a misquote. Or he’ll do what he did to Candace Owens and falsely claim his chapter was “satirical.” Or he’ll point-blank lie like he did to Chuck Todd when the journalist pointed out his book didn’t contain a “Big tech stole the election” angle. So even if you buy the book, good luck having an honest conversation about it.
While it’s true that Ramaswamy isn’t supporting a policy change of adding a 59% inheritance tax—because that would be bonkers in a Republican primary—he does support what he believes is a “moral duty” the tax would impose upon Americans.
I’m not questioning a policy position that doesn’t (currently) exist. I’m questioning his ethics.
To pretend Ramaswamy doesn’t support an inheritance tax is ludicrous, especially if you’ve read his book. I have to wonder if Ramaswamy and his comms team are really trying to sell more copies or if they’re bluffing voters because they don’t think anyone will genuinely read it. Ramaswamy kicks around different economic philosophies, and he seems quite inspired by socialist Thomas Piketty.
Ramaswamy is concerned about rich parents, who have earned their money, passing off their wealth to their children—who have not earned it—and what sort of unproductive citizens they’ll devolve into, thus terrorizing the rest of society. A repeated example he uses is Roman Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix played a fictionalized version in the film Gladiator). “That’s the paradoxical thing about meritocracy: it contains the seeds of its own demise. The free transfer of wealth in a meritocratic system will create inequality. That inequality will widen and become entrenched as parents pass their wealth to their less-deserving children. And the resulting hereditary aristocracy will undermine the equality of opportunity necessary for meritocracy.”
The solution proposed is an inheritance tax rate of at least 59%. Ramaswamy notes that Robert Nozick, “the philosophical father of libertarianism,” would reject this proposal because your wealth is your property, and you can give it to whoever you want. He acknowledges that people spend their whole lives accumulating wealth to pass it down to their children.
“My response is that we should think of inheritance taxes not just as a way of redistributing wealth, but a way of redistributing duty. Yes, by definition preventing parents from creating dynasties is a restriction on their liberty. Civilization itself amounts to a collective agreement for each individual to give up some liberties so that the group can prosper.”
This is not a conservative viewpoint. This is not a libertarian viewpoint. As a Christian, it throws me for a loop because “a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” (Proverbs 13:22). Yes, the Bible criticizes people who don’t take care of the poor while living lavishly, but that’s a moral issue that we have a duty to self-correct. Jesus Christ talks about how difficult it is for a rich man to get into Heaven, but it’s possible with God—not the government. It is not the government’s job to forcibly confiscate your wealth—that has already been taxed—just so your progeny can have less. Part of the “more perfect Union” laid out in the Preamble to the United States Constitution is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for not only ourselves but our “Posterity.” Blessings are gifts, and we have a right to give what we earn to our children. Ramaswamy has taken a few talking points from Larry Elder on the “epidemic of fatherlessness,” yet he wants to remove a father’s inheritance to stuff the government’s pockets. And since Ramaswamy has brought theology to the forefront of his campaign by stating the “truth” of “God is real,” it’s only appropriate to point out that covetousness, desiring people or possessions that don’t belong to you, is sinful. Ramaswamy doesn’t share my Christian faith, but it remains a truth regardless.
Ramaswamy told Candace Owens in an interview, when questioned about some of the statements in his book, that it was “intellectual” and “not candidate books.” Would he have worded things a little more carefully if he intended to run for president back then? Absolutely. But that’s why we should take his words to heart: because his thoughts are laid bare. It’s not like he wrote it ten years ago.
When he was asked about it in an interview, Ramaswamy said he wouldn’t pass a 59% inheritance tax in today’s context, but he did say that if we had a low flat-rate tax “but trade that off to say that each generation starts in the same place, I would absolutely take that trade in an instant.”
Ramaswamy says he’s trying to preserve meritocracy, but it sounds a whole lot like equity. Once upon a time, another “skinny guy with a funny name” was questioned by a hardworking plumber (God rest his soul), about redistributing his wealth. “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success too.” But President Barrack Obama did punish success, and businesses during his administration did contemplate whether they would work harder and risk rising into a higher tax bracket just to lose what they earned. But Obama also scoffed at the audacity of business owners to be so braggadocios about their hard work. “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Now, if you’re inheriting your parent’s money or their business, you didn’t build that, but someone else built it for you. Hopefully, parents are building it with you and expanding the dream. It is not ethical to strip more than half of that inheritance away to stuff the government’s coffers, so they can spend it on “fresh, never frozen fetal tissue,” military gender reassignment surgeries, sending Korean kids to DC to learn about climate change activism, and so on.
Senator Rand Paul, a true libertarian-leaning Republican, will tell you that no one is entitled to his labor. But he will tell you, as a Christian, he has a moral duty to give back. That’s why he voluntarily founded an eye care clinic for low-income people, giving free eye exams and surgeries. We have to challenge each other to do what we ought to, instead of using the government to enforce our entitled desires through the threat of force. The government’s purpose is supposed to secure our unalienable rights, not rob our children. The Right isn’t supposed to be about making people less free and the government more powerful.
Will Vivek Ramaswamy commit today to not leave more than 41% of his fortune to his family and give the rest to the government? He can write that will today. But that would be his choice. Even if he doesn’t plan to introduce a 59% inheritance tax after implementing his proposed flat tax, the support of it makes me believe he’s the least conservative person in the race.
And no amount of snarky fact-checking on Ramaswamy’s campaign website is going to erase what I purchased and downloaded into my Kindle.
