Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) isn’t a conservative, although he often agrees with conservatives. He’s made statements in the past about wanting to tax the rich more.

But even though he’s not a conservative, he’s also not particularly liberal nor is he as manic as Joe Biden is when it comes to taxes.

On Monday, Biden dropped a plan to impose a 20 percent minimum tax on billionaires as part of his budget request to Congress. His plan is already facing a lot of questions because it’s a wealth tax that punishes the successful. As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observed, while it might be popular now with the left, it’s a new unprecedented effort trying to tax “unrealized gains” and may be unconstitutional. Plus, it’s unlikely to stop with just billionaires. This is the way to slip it in and make it more acceptable to Americans, but dollars to donuts, something that starts with billionaires is not going to stop with them.

Manchin has now come out and said that he’s not supportive of this idea, likely killing the plan before it even gets started and stomping all over Biden’s dreams because they would need every Democrat on board to have hope of getting it passed.

From The Hill:

“You can’t tax something that’s not earned. Earned income is what we’re based on,” he told The Hill. “There’s other ways to do it. Everybody has to pay their fair share.”

“Everybody has to pay their fair share, that’s for sure. But unrealized gains is not the way to do it, as far as I’m concerned,” he added.

Taxing on something that you haven’t gained yet not only is unprecedented, it’s also complicated as to how you could calculate it.

“The problem with that particular tax is that it’s a tax on unrealized gains,” said Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.), a member of the Finance Committee.

“It’s essentially taxing people before they get the income, and that seems like a really dangerous precedent in tax law because if you have a gain one year and then a huge loss the next year, how’s the government going to pay people back for their losses?” he said.

“We’ve always had a principle in our tax policy that a gain has to be actually realized, income has to be received before it can be taxed, and this completely undermines that principle,” he added. “It’s a wealth tax basically, but I think it’s a dangerous precedent.”

But Democrats want to do it because it makes the radical left happy and they think this is a way to pay for all their spending. This is a cash grab because they don’t have any other answers. Plus, what they’re claiming already sounds like they want to apply it to more than just billionaires.

The White House budget office in a press release Monday explained that the tax would apply only to the wealthiest 0.01 percent of households, those with more than $100 million in assets. Half the estimated revenue it would produce would come from billionaires.

“It would ensure that, in any given year, they pay at least 20 percent of their total income in Federal income taxes,” the Office of Management and Budget said.

Maybe there’s something I’m not understanding but that says it’s applying to people with $100 million in assets, not just billionaires. Once they start down this road, you can bet they’re going to come for more of us, because that’s the nature of government and they already take too much. So good for Manchin — for once again — having some basic common sense. I’m going to bet he’s not the only one who will be calling for a halt to this nonsense. Likely Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) would have an issue with this as well based on her prior tax comments. Hopefully, this is dead as a doornail as an idea.