This might be a news flash to most Real Vision subscribers -- but our taxes don't fund our Federal Govt. This is not how system works. Mass ignorance of system is major problem and bankers and others purposely put out more and more misinformation to keep people from learning truth. Just ask yourself one simple question -- why would the US govt have to borrow dollars from China or tax its citizens to raise USD's ---- When it creates the dollars?? Has anyones taxes gone up since trillions spent on war- exact opposite - Trump cut taxes?? Nope -- just constant fear that one day they will. WE are not GREECE --- US is Japan and how many fools keep making bet that any day now Japan is going to go broke (25 years and counting) OPEN your eyes and ask some questions - do some critical thinking, stop repeating same old narrative.

What's missing here is the root cause of the problem which is really government failures across the board: overspending, lack of accountability, poor regulation, increasingly stifling and costly bureaucracy, poor pension planning, etc. We have a huge spending and efficiency problem within public institutuons at all levels. They are generally unprofitable, way too expensive & wasteful and generally unaccountable. So 'taxing the rich' does not really solve anything and only might provide a brief respite after which they would carry on spending like drunken sailors. Also, I would add that the monopolistic tech billionaires are what amplified a lot of this inequality. They operated in a very open often untaxed free market on the internet and in tech paying little to no taxes, all the while establishing monopolies via surveillance capitalistic methods. Ironic that these same billionaires who fot wealthy in wide open capitalist markets now support many of these extremist socialist policies. Hypocritical and very disingenous.

Rule of Law --- that is what this country is lacking. Over last 40 years financial class and international corporations have rigged system and robbed hard working people. These banking and corporate criminals need to be held accountable and put in jail for long long time. How about nobody steals from anybody. RULE OF LAW!! FYI -- we have a fiat system, not fixed exchange rate system. So, you are WRONG when you say how are we going to "pay for it" - when it comes to medicare for all or education. Hmm? How do we pay trillions for war, or trillons for bank bailouts? How is FED creating trillions in reserves for crazy REPO markets? Don't tell me we borrow from China? THINK!!! Why would USA borrow US dollars from China when the USA makes US dollars --- because we don't. Wake up and understand how our monetary policy works and stop talking like we are on a gold standard. WE can print as much fiat as underlying resources that we have --- it is that simple. US is world reserve and even if it wasn't it wouldn't matter - but Federal Govt can create money out of nothing and buy ANYTHING that is for sale in USD's. Our money gets its value from state imposing taxes to paid in USD on its citizens. Fiat does not get its value from being scarce. And if you get inflation --the solution is taking money out of the system by cutting Federal Spending or raising taxes. Go back and look at WW2 and how US paid for War, US was not gold standard. It is all there. YOU have all been mislead as to how our system really works. OPEN your eyes.

If this is the best that the defenders of the “genius” of the financial industry can come up with then the pitchforks will come out faster and more violently than the industry expects. Thank you Real Vision for sharing this opinion piece.

Far too politically oriented. The arguments are losing force due to the political agenda behind the speech.

Since the founding of RV I have found it a refuge from the daily political junk in our faces on every media venue. I personally don't want to pay to see it on RV and strongly object to this type of content being included.

Yesterday's news. Polls are already showing that people don't want the policies of Elizabeth Warren.

This analysis applies to an entire wave of politicians who have -- and will keep having -- similar plans. It's not just about Warren, even though, yes, she's toast this cycle. Nice job, David.

When I worked in State government, part of my job was to analyze the commerce and consumer bills introduced in the legislature each year so that the agency could testify either for or against them in committee (not on the merit, but about enforcement issues, conflicting laws, conflicting judicial rulings, etc). For the seven years that I did this, not one bill advanced out of committee without industry sponsorship. Read that again and let it sink-in. Another way of saying this is that it didn't matter who the citizens elected, big business owned the legislative process and actively pushed to enact anti-consumer legislation (they typically wanted to enact regulations that created additional barriers to entry to stifle competitors). This is understandably frustrating voters and Warren is pandering to that. Warren's "cure" will actually make the problem worse and it will inflict economic damage as David said, but if this situation isn't fixed, it's only a matter of time until voters elect someone like Warren. If we want to preserve the US republic and some semblance of free markets, business better recognize the damage they're causing and reform their ways.

What if someone took out the top 100 insanely rich tech billionaires, and then re-ran the wealth inequality metrics? People like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc have skewed the numbers so far to an extreme that any analysis that includes them does not present a true account of inequality. There are a very few with insane wealth levels, many more are simply rich. Does it make sense to turn capitalism upside down with a wealth tax on this basis?

The only reason he is being interviewed is because he wrote a book. Its not that hard to find Elizabeth Warren critiques in the financial community. His responses are just 1 opinion "according to my math" after another Real Vision needs to upgrade their interviews

1000 felony convictions related to the S&L crisis. Exactly ZERO convictions for the profoundly abundant and varied crimes (control fraud; fraudulent conveyance; violations of agency; etc.; etc) that led to the GFC that might be what, 65 times larger? The establishment--both political parties--chose to abandon capitalism when they let the GFC develop and unfold, and then responded to it with bailouts of those most responsible for the crisis. Worse, their tactics enshrined fraud (suspension of FASB 187) and perpetuated the ponzi nature of required ever-expanding debt. Too big to fail => too big to jail => and soon enough, we'll see, too big to bail. This country has had a long history of at least tolerance, if not reverence, for the pursuit and acquisition of wealth, including fairly extreme levels of wealth. It's the "in your face", impossible to ignore, complete absence of equal justice, that makes the growing wealth disparity repulsive to increasing numbers of the public. Whether fully informed and articulate, or simply relying upon a vague suspicion or awareness, much of the electorate senses something is profoundly wrong and they've had enough. The attraction of Warren to a modest slice of Democratic primary voters is a symptom; the election of Trump is another. The establishment has failed spectacularly, and worse, most people can sense that rather than reforming, the establishment is content to simply dig in. I don't think there's any white knight coming to make reform easy. I tell my partisan friends, both flavors, that I think this will get worse, likely much worse, before it gets better. If you think Warren is dangerous, or if you think Trump is dangerous, just brace yourself for what comes next.

What if wealth inequality is an Ok thing? The start of any discussion about inequality almost invariably starts with an assumed consensus that wealth inequality is a bad thing. I would argue it is not. If there is someone serving you a Gin Tonic, that someone is probably poorer than you are. Do you have a problem with that relationship? I don't. And I don't whether I am the served or the server. Actually, when I was younger, I used to serve Port to horse riders before fox hunting events. I didn't mind, I was happy with the income.

Weak arguments, lacks data that aligns with the perspectives.

That the top x% pay 40% of the taxes isn't a justification, but a symptom of the problem. Shouldn't we then repeal tax cut packages that fail to deliver the promised revenue, drive deficits that result in money printing, thereby enriching bankers and creating investment bubbles while laying the debt on the citizens?...hypothetically, of course.

This “content shift” real vision has video counts going from 2 a day to 1 a day... may not sub going forward if content continues this shift

I dont get it why we film someone about Eliz Warren, She is not winning at all

Wow that was a nicely balanced piece

the worst possible argument again wealth taxes: you know, the rich will always find loopholes. Look at the poor rich french people, they are forced to divorce to avoid paying it.

What I don't understand is why those opposed to socialism/hard left don't push for an alternative minimum redistribution assessment. Those who would normally be taxed for redistribution policies can elect to redistribute that money through charity instead. Ex: instead of paying 1 million in taxes that will go to public housing, you pay for 1 million worth of rent for other people. It takes some time to think about how you would work out the details but you could create a system whereby instead of the government taxing and spending people are encouraged to shield themselves from the tax liability through charitable efforts. Probably the largest obstacle is that so much of the charitable giving in the US is sent overseas. Id much rather see people giving direct transfers in goods, services or cash to fellow Americans (or whatever other country you are in) rather than creating a layer of bureaucratic incentives to waste this money.

Worthy topic, highly biased interviewee since he is promoting a book on the topic.

I think monetary policy over the last couple of decades has been the main cause of rising wealth inequality. Janet, Alan, and Ben (the JAB threesome). Seems to me the rising popularity of extreme left and extreme right leaning politicians are just an effect of this monetary policy.

I am not a fan of a wealth tax either, but the truth is that rising wealth inequality is one of the biggest economic challenges of our time. Bahnsen makes good points why a wealth tax by itself wouldn't be very effective. Yet he is completely oblivious to the fact that his smug and self-assured sitting there in his $2000 suit, that makes his dencouncing of every possible measure addressing wealth inequality makes him completely non-credible, and that it is people like him that give Warren support & ammunition in the first place. Half of his points are straw man arguments just defending the status quo. So what if the 10% richest housholds pay 40% of the taxes? That's exactly how it should be if you understand the corrosive effects of wealth inequality. I wouldn't vote for Warren either, but we have to do a much better job explaining what would be BETTER mechanisms to address wealth inequality. Bahnsen clearly doesn't have any answers to that, and has no interest in finding them, because he is a beneficiary of the status quo. Yet, no society has survived that followed the trajectory the US is currently on until the end.

If Warren manages to win, it will be because of the results of the policies that fail to see wealth increases for the majority of Americans in real terms over the past 30+ years. It is those same conditions that led to a Trump win in 2016. If we don't take the problems seriously, then the people will take the first solution offered. I don't disagree with the speaker, but at this stage of the game we need more than a critique of the policy. We need real alternatives. There are a not so insignificant growing group of people in this country who are becoming frustrated enough that they wouldn't care as much about the damage done by Warren's policy so long as it hurts the rich. That is a very dangerous attitude and one which needs to be addressed. Problems left unattended have a way of finding their own solutions. But those solutions are always worse outcomes than if we addressed the problem when we saw it.

Economist Mark Blyth Explains "Ok Boomer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjbWLK3_vXc 8:00 to 15:00 or so Blyth explains wealth vs income taxes. At 10:00 a discussion of taxes including wealth tax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS6FvvyZsrU&t=317s The problem with this discussion is the last 20 years of wars need to be paid for or defaulted on. What is the plan for paying it? I recommend Mark Blyth as a RV guest.

Conservative politics (both left and right) have led to massive wealth inequality, its a problem that needs to be solved. I absolutely agree Warren's policies aren't workable, but is the result of a complete failure of economic policies for decades, from both left and right. The only way to prevent policies like Warren's by gaining traction, is to actually create good economic outcomes for ALL Americans. I strongly recommend you get started in trying to do this.