Richest Would Have Lost Half Their Wealth Under Elizabeth Warren’s Tax Plan

Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could have collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars in net worth over decades if presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan had been in effect — and they had done nothing to avoid it.

That’s according to calculations in a new paper by two French economists, who helped her devise the proposed tax on the wealthiest Americans.

The top 15 richest Americans would have seen their net worth decline by more than half to $433.9 billion had Warren’s plan been in place since 1982, according to the paper by University of California, Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

Critics have charged that the tax would be hard to administer and easy to avoid.  They’ve also questioned its constitutionality.