Laura,

You do know Gates and Buffet have committed to give the vast majority of their fortunes to charity when they die. Even while they are living both Gates and Buffet have given tremendous amounts of money to the Gates Foundation which is doing amazing things around the world.

You might know Bezos is going through a divorce. MacKenzie Bezos pledged to give half her $37 billion to charity when she gets it. Prior to his divorce Jeff Bezos was working on plans to give away a substantial amount of his $140 billion when he died. In the meantime, a great deal of his money goes to fund space research. Billionaires are the primary money behind the arts, that we all enjoy. Symphonies, orchestras, and many museums would not exist without their generosity… artists enrich our lives, but their “patrons” make it possible.

None of the “tax” reasons you noted explain the wealth of Gates, Buffet, and Bezos. Just like the average working guy who owns a home does not pay taxes on its appreciation until he (or she) sells their home, the same is true for a business owner. The billionaires you mentioned have sold very little of what they own. Also giving money to charity does not lower your tax on the money you did not give to charity, you simple do not pay taxes on the money you gave away.

Something like half the fortune of America’s billionaires is destined for charity, the big exceptions are mostly privately owned businesses where the owners want to pass on their billionaire businesses to their children.

How did these people get so rich? They got rich by providing products and services for a really good price that we all want. I am an Amazon Prime member, every time I order from Amazon, some of the money goes to Bezos’s pocket. My computer runs on Microsoft, it was pretty cheap and works great, but costs almost nothing to “produce”, just download the software. Money into Gates’ pocket. The point is its not the tax system that makes people rich, its what they sell that we want that makes them rich.

I want to create 50 more billionaires with the world’s money. I want each person that invents a cost competitive sustainable way of producing massive amounts of cheap energy without fossil fuels, who surrenders all the rights to their invention so the world can use it to help their people to be given a billion dollars tax free. Would you oppose that?

If nearly 7 billion people benefited from an invention, why begrudge the inventor one billion dollars to enjoy. Think about how many people around the world would devote their efforts to solving the global energy issues, if they had a chance to earn a billion dollar paycheck. My point, let’s not begrudge billionaires who have made our lives better the fruits of their inventions or even their children. Look less at how much people have and more at how they got it. If they got it providing some valuable for all of us, then they deserve it… if they got it by using their “connections” to get political favors done… take it all…

I am a white man and I find angry feminists and angry African Americans as much of the problem as those few angry white men that feel threatened by competition. Jealousy in any color, any gender, any faith, etc. is bad. Imposing values on others is bad. Our country was founded on a set of shared values (civil rights) and the rule of law and the rights of property, that’s who we are.

If you want to unify the country, the only way that will happen is under Trump. Not because he is a “great man”, but because he is willing to “make a deal”. Historically, ideological Democrats and Republicans have not been willing to make a deal. Presidents have avoided “compromise” by going with executive orders or signing on to things like the Paris Accords without Congresses approval, or committing military forces to Libya without running it by Congress. The examples above were by Obama, but he is not unique in this area. As our country becomes more polarized, our leaders do likewise. Trump is a bit of an exception… not since Bill Clinton have we had a President so personally flawed, yet so willing to compromise.

The closest thing I saw to a Democrat, I would vote for was Howard Schultz (a Democratic billionaire), but the party turned on him with brutal attacks. So if a moderate Democrat feels, he has no chance of getting elected as a “Democrat”, then that says a lot. Trump was a Democrat in the past, his policies are not Republican policies, but rather a blend of Democratic and Republican policies of the past. Compare Trump with JFK’s policies and it looks like Trump stole the Democrat’s 1960 party platform to get elected.

Are Trump’s immigration policies different than those of Bill Clinton or even Obama or Chuck Schumer ten years ago? Has Trump tried to take back the civil liberties of any group… he bad mouths the press, but Obama spied on them… which is worse? I do not like Trump, the person; but his policies are very good for working people as evidenced by the low unemployment and faster rising wages in the last two years than the previous ten.

The current Democrats are all about “resisting” Trump and pushing entitlements our country cannot fund even with higher taxes. We are a trillion short already per year. People don’t realize how much a trillion is. If we took 100% of the money of a billionaire to fund the deficit, then each year, we would put 1,000 billionaires on food stamps!

And even without any new entitlements being proposed by current Democrats running for President, that number will keep going up. So we already have a small problem. There are only slightly more than 600 billionaires in our country. And even those few that have “billions and billions” of dollars would be wiped out in five years. Another three or four years after that we would wipe out all the multi-millionaires. Then what?

Is that so bad? Well nearly every company in the US would be owned by a foreigner. Why? Because the wealth of the wealthy is what stands behind the businesses in America. They are wealthy because they own huge businesses, take away their money, and they have to sell those businesses to pay the taxes. If there are no billionaires to buy in the US, they get sold to foreign owners.Another reason I liked Howard Schultz is he knows this since he built Starbucks. Starbucks needs over $24 billion in “people’s savings” so it can open its doors all over the world. Where is that money coming from under the proposals of the current Democrats?

The Democratic moderates have been largely ignored in Congress and the result is people who voted for Democratic moderates to give the Dems control of the House are very disappointed in how the Dems have used that control. They expected the Dems would pass good things like the improved trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, negotiate an immigration and border security deal that both sides could live with, and get some improvements passed in health care reform. But instead they focus on “impeachment” when two thirds of the country has said through repeated polls that they are simply not interested in “impeachment”. Are they representatives of “the people”, if they ignore “the people”?

So I would support a Kennedy Democrat, even a Clinton Democrat, but the current crop is terrible. They have no sense of economics. Income redistribution and wealth destruction through taxes are not the answer to raising up the living standards of American workers.

Wealth destruction leaves a country in poverty… If you take “wealth” from a rich person and give it to a poor person (who spends it), you have destroyed the wealth (it is no longer available to be invested to create jobs and new products). If the government really wants to create wealth, it must find a way to “force” everyone to save. Each year, our economy needs over $1.7 trillion in “savings” to grow 2–3%. If we tax the incomes of the rich more, where will the lost “savings” come from? Where is that money coming from under any of the proposals by Democrats? You and I need our economy to do that, I like the products and services I can buy in this country, but it takes equipment, land, and working capital to make them.

As a moderate Republican, I can live with Roe v Wade if they apply the revised “viability” standard to abortion (20 weeks). I believe we need some trade barriers or better trade treaties to help our workers earn more. I believe in legal immigration and while I would like to see a greater percentage of it be merit based, I think the number could be as high as 1.5 million a year. I support a “path to citizenship” only after the border is secure enough to limit illegal immigration (including refugees) to less than 250,000 a year.

I want to maintain the current corporate/capital tax cuts, but I have no big issue restoring the higher taxes on individual incomes. I am a classical liberal which means I oppose any attempts by the right or left to impose “speech” on others… I also oppose identity politics. I believe we should vote based on our self interests and not the color of our skin, our religion, our gender, or any other discriminatory basis… I practice what I preach, I have an Asian wife, and five of my six grandchildren are African American.

I oppose reparations… my family never owned slaves and my African American grandchildren are not descended from American slaves. Why should a hard working Hispanic family or Italian family or German family pay reparations to my grandchildren, they have not suffered because of slavery?

I support community choice on schools… let each community decide what education system they want to pay for unless that system discriminates. So your town wants charter schools, school vouchers, etc. great… if my town is happy with its public schools, then we should be able to keep things as they are.

You can’t unify the country until you break down identity politics… that was the core message of Martin Luther King and I agree with it. The Democrats have embraced Malcolm X’s philosophy where various identity groups form alliances (as you suggest in your paragraph) and use those alliances to gain political power. History teaches us that all that achieves is a possible realignment of power and not social equality which is my goal.