Can the super rich be the solution to the US budget?
3 min readThere are some well-known names in the general public among Americans who may fall within the new tax range proposed by President Joe Biden.
The scheme aims to retain the money generated by stock market rallies in recent years.
Taxes will rise for a very small number of people – 20,000 U.S. taxpayers, with more than $ 100 million in wealth.
Among the victims were investor Warren Buffett, Tesla boss Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Under the proposal, the richest 0.01% of Americans would have to pay at least 20% tax on their income.
There is a major change in the rules of income calculation. Equity gains are taxable even if the shares are not sold by the taxable investor.
“This approach means that rich Americans, like everyone else, pay taxes according to what they earn, and eliminates useless income protection that lasts for decades or generations,” the White House said.
Obstacles
This is the latest in a long list of attempts to raise taxes on the super-rich. This faces major hurdles in Washington – not to mention the millionaires affected by the move.
The Boston Advisory Council estimates that there are 20,600 people in the United States worth more than $ 100 million.
According to the White House, more than half of the estimated $ 360 billion in revenue over a 10-year period, if approved, would come from the approximately 700 billionaires living in the United States.
Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and the richest man in the world, tweeted last year, “In an hour they run out of other people’s money and then they follow you.” He commented on the proposed taxation which is parallel to the current taxation.
According to Biden’s proposal, Gabriel Jukemann, an economist at the University of California, Musk – the father of seven and earning more than $ 280 billion, will have to pay more than $ 50 billion in taxes in 10 years. Berkeley.
Under the same calculation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would spend $ 35 billion and mega-investor Warren Buffett another $ 26 billion.
Professor Jukeman, who researched the wealth of billionaires and helped create a wealth tax plan for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign on the left of the Democratic Party, tweeted, “This is no small feat.”
Biden’s proposal also calls for an increase in the income tax rate on households earning more than $ 400,000 – from 37% to 39.6%.
The corporate tax will be raised to 28%, which will somewhat reverse the cuts made under the Trump administration.
Biden would encourage other reforms to tax tax gains on the value of shares and assets, which does not only apply to wealthy Americans.
Overall, the White House says these changes will help reduce the deficit by $ 1 trillion over the next decade.
By 2022, the annual deficit is projected to exceed $ 1.2 trillion. Total debt topped $ 30 trillion last month.
Biden has long called for financial changes to affect this year’s budget, but to no avail.
In Congress, other plans to raise taxes on the rich met with little success.
Democrat Senator Joe Mansin – a key member of Biden’s party who blocked a broader proposal – said a similar plan by fellow Ron Wyden last year was too complex and affected different people.
Other Democrats expressed concern about the credibility of other bills and the possibility of legal challenges.
U.S. Treasury officials said Monday that the goal is to push forward the debate in Washington on whether the country’s rich should be taxed more fairly.
A 2020 analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington – based think tank, found that 400 wealthy families in the United States have more than 10 million families in the country’s black population.
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