The Millionaires' Surcharge - one GREAT thing about H.R. 3962

[inna]

One of the few things to like about this bill (and something that Obama promised during the campaign). Let's just hope that the millionaires' surtax won't get killed in the Senate (although I won't be surprised if it will).

The new tax on America’s rich that House lawmakers have now adopted, to offset the cost of health care reform, sets an unexpected — and healthy — tax precedent. The House bill adds a 5.4 percent surtax on income, for couples, over $1 million. The wealthy currently face a top tax rate of 35 percent on income over $372,950. But this 35 percent rate only applies to salaries and other “ordinary” income. The capital gains that come from wheeling and dealing on stocks, bonds, and other assets face, under existing law, just a 15 percent tax, as does income from dividends. That's one big reason why America’s 400 top taxpayers, at last IRS count, paid only 17.2 percent of their $263.3 million average incomes to Uncle Sam. The new House surtax, by contrast, would apply to all income, capital gains and dividends included. Only the most affluent 0.3 percent of American households — average income, $2.8 million — would pay higher federal income taxes if the House bill becomes law . . .

http://www.toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html

[inna]

1. From the same link:

Inequality's Death Toll: A New Calculation


How powerful an impact does inequality have on health? In the world’s top 30 industrial nations, the Japanese and American research team concludes, “upwards of 1.5 million deaths” — nearly 10 percent of total mortality in the age 15-to-60 age group — could be prevented by reducing income inequality.

The impact of inequality on the United States turns out to be even more stunning, not surprisingly since no developed nation sports wider gaps in income and wealth. Of the deaths the new BMJ study ties to inequality, almost 900,000 came in the United States.

Too Much last week asked a leading U.S. epidemiologist, Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of the Public Health, to place that calculation in perspective.

“We can say,” he noted, “that one in four deaths can be attributed to our high rates of income inequality.”

Such numbers have, of course, enormous political implications. An unequal society, as last week’s BMJ editorial noted, amounts to a “broken society.” Political leaders, the editorial continued, now need to repair that break — “by undoing the widening of inequalities that has taken place since the 1970s.”

Source:
Naoki Kondo, Grace Sembajwe, Ichiro Kawachi, Rob van Dam, S. V. Subramanian, and Zentaro Yamagata, Income inequality, mortality and self-rated health: meta-analysis of multilevel studies. BMJ, November 10, 2009.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, Greater equality and better health. BMJ editorial, November 10, 2009.


:wow:

[inna]

2. kick.

These numbers need to be seen.

Just think about it, 900,000 deaths in the US could be prevented by reducing income inequality, according to the British Medical Journal (the world's most influential and widely read medical journals).

[Hannah Bell]

3. kick

[leftstreet]

4. The House of Lords will kill this n/t

[Cerridwen]

5. Kick.

Just as I was about to hollering about whether or not it was a tax on *earned* income or *all* income, I read "would apply to all income, capital gains and dividends included." Whew!

This impacts .03 percentof taxpayers. Watch the spin machine spin it to include "joe, the unlicensed plumber."

[inna]

6. Wow. Of course, they killed it, and killed it with vengeance, too.

Instead of taxing the rich to pay for a significant piece of the bill, as the House does, the Senate plan would tax "Cadillac" health plans.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/18/senate-dems-close-in-on-r_n_363094.html



:wtf: