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Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban called out Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“I don’t mind being taxed more. I wrote a blog 20 years ago saying it’s the most patriotic thing you can do, after military service, is pay your taxes, because that’s what allows everybody to live and to prosper.”
“But yeah, the idea of ‘soak the rich,’ billionaire tears that fill that cup — screw you, Elizabeth Warren. You’re everything that’s wrong with politics.”
Warren unveiled her idea for a so-called “ultra-millionaire tax” during her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The plan is still available on her website and it calls for the creation of a tax that would apply only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more.
Her website says:
For decades, the wealthy and the well-connected have put the American government to work for their narrow interests. As a result, a small group of families has taken a massive amount of the wealth American workers have produced, while America’s middle class has been hollowed out.
The result is an extreme concentration of wealth not seen in any other leading economy. The 400 richest Americans currently own more wealth than all Black households and a quarter of Latino households combined. According to an analysis from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California-Berkeley, the richest top 0.1% has seen its share of American wealth nearly triple from 7% to 20% between the late 1970s and 2016, while the bottom 90% has seen its share of wealth decline from 35% to 25% in that same period. Put another way, the richest 130,000 families in America now hold nearly as much wealth as the bottom 117 million families combined.
Warren has historically clashed with billionaires like Musk and Jeff Bezos, but now she has Mark Cuban clashing with her.
Cuban previously called out Warren during an October 2021 appearance on Fox Business Network while talking about calls by some Democrats for a new tax for unrealized gains on investments. He called the proposal a “disaster.”
“I don’t think Elizabeth Warren knows at all what she’s talking about when she deals with this,” Cuban said at the time. “I think she just likes to demonize people that are wealthy and that’s fine.”
“It’s a great political move for her, but I just don’t think that they really understand the implications of taxing unrealized gains,” he continued.
Warren fired back after those comments and said, Mark Cuban’s problem is not that I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Warren said. “Mark Cuban’s problem is that I know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“We need to change the laws so they’re not written just by the lobbyists for Mark Cuban and his buddies,” she added.
Cuban has an estimated personal fortune of $4.6 billion.
