WaPo: The Finance 202: Warren's wealth tax is fundamentally about fairness
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) just dropped a tax policy bombshell that should explode any lingering doubt that her party is veering left on the issue and preparing to make the yawning wealth gap a central focus of the 2020 presidential campaign.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2019/01/25/the-finance-202-warren-s-wealth-tax-is-fundamentally-about-fairness/5c4a2c5b1b326b29c3778cc1/?utm_term=.89b03cb80fdb
The proposal, word of
which was first broken yesterday by my colleagues Jeff Stein and Christopher Ingraham, would apply a 2 percent annual wealth tax on the net worth of those 75,000 households with more than $50 million in total assets. Those with more than a billion dollars in assets would face an additional 1 percent tax.
It would generate $2.75 trillion over a decade, according to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the University of California at Berkeley economists who advised Warren on the plan.
But Warren, notably, is pitching the idea foremost as a means of rebalancing the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon she frames as a threat to democracy itself, rather than leading with the ambitious programs the new revenue could fund.
Today in America, the top one-tenth of 1 percent has amassed about as much wealth as 90 percent of America: Upper middle class, middle class, working class, working poor and the poor poor, Warren said in an interview last night on MSNBCs All In With Chris Hayes. And the consequence of having amassed that much wealth is bad for our economy a tiny group of people making decisions that always tend to favor a lot of big corporations and bad for our democracy. Because it means, just like you hear, its now a democracy that is influenced by the wealthy, the well connected, and it's not working for the people.
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