Private investment billionaire Sam Zell says he’s concerned Joe Biden would govern as a socialist if elected, and the next three months will reveal where he stands.
“The $64 question is: Who is Joe Biden?” Zell said Wednesday on CNBC. “And is Joe Biden the Joe Biden of 20 years ago or is…Joe Biden just a placeholder for the Democratic Party being taken over by the radical left.
“The ideas of, what I’ll call for lack of a better word, the radical left are relatively catastrophic for the future of our country.”
Zell, who founded Equity Group Investments and also is the chairman of several other publicly traded companies including real estate firm Equity Residential and waste-to-energy corporation Covanta, said he was a Democrat in his younger days but as he aged has become more of an independent and “probably a Republican.”
He said his big worry about Biden is “whether he has the commitment to be a centrist or whether he’s just going to be run over.”
“Let’s put it like this: If you told me that the Obama-Biden plan or methodology was going to be repeated for the next four years, I would be a lot less worried than I am now,” he said.
Zell was generally complimentary of President Donald Trump’s policies regarding taxes and regulation, and hoped that they would continue to get the country out of the economic downturn caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
“Many of the things that the Trump administration did were positive,” Zell said.
And while hoping for a more moderate Biden than apparently what he was seeing, Zell was critical of the Obama-era policies, which he said were geared at wealth redistribution.
“I don’t believe redistribution is the solution for anything,” he said.
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