Senator Elizabeth Warren was ready for claims that her proposed tax on wealth — a 2 percent annual tax on fortunes over $50 million, plus an additional one percent on wealth over $1 billion — would be unconstitutional. When she announced the plan, her Senate office produced two letters from groups of prominent legal academics, including specialists in constitutional law and tax law, saying her plan passes muster.
Their position is plausible enough: Bruce Ackerman, a law and political science professor at Yale and one of the signers of one of Warren's letters, has been making scholarly arguments for the constitutionality of a wealth tax for two decades. A lot of academics agree with him.
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