Democratic senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is expected to announce her plan for a new wealth tax that will affect the richest 0.1% of Americans. The tax is intended to help curb America\u2019s astronomical gap in income equality.<\/p>\n
The wealthiest 1% of American households now hold 40% of the country\u2019s wealth, the largest discrepancy in at least 50 years.<\/p>\n
The proposal will likely levy a 2% tax on Americans with assets over $50 million and a 3% tax on those with more than $1 billion. The tax is projected to raise $2.75 trillion over a ten-year period.<\/p>\n
The tax plan will also create three new mechanisms to combat tax evasion.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the key motivations for introducing a progressive wealth tax is to curb the growing concentration of wealth,\u201d Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economic advisors to Warren said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe top 1 percent wealth share has increased dramatically from about 22 percent in the late 1970s to around 40 percent in recent years,\u201d Zucman and Saez continued.\u00a0\u201cConversely, the wealth share of the bottom 95 percent of families has declined from about 50 percent in the late 1970s to about 40 percent today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this time it\u2019s not known what Warren plans to do with the money raised from the tax hike to address America\u2019s inequality issues.<\/p>\n
However, the additional income for the government generated by\u00a0the tax hike probably won\u2019t change things significantly. The 2017 Trump tax cut for the wealthy cut federal tax revenues\u00a0by about $230 billion a year, this money does little more than replenish what was lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But, there are some positive things that $275 billion a year could do to help the other 99.9% of Americans:<\/p>\n
\u2014 Pay for 10% of a Medicare for All plan ($2.5 trillion annual cost).<\/p>\n
\u2014 Completely fund free colleges and universities ($75 billion).<\/p>\n
\u2014 Pay for 75% of the annual interest on the national debt ($364 billion) or it could reduce the annual contribution to the national debt by about 28% ($1 trillion in 2020).<\/p>\n
\u2014 If we saved the tax money for a little over five years, we could pay off the country\u2019s student loan debt\u00a0($1.5 trillion).<\/p>\n
\u2014 We could dramatically increase the annual spending on K through 12 education ($649 billion a year).<\/p>\n
\u2014 Cut every\u00a0American who isn\u2019t super wealthy a $846.00 check every year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Share image by Edward Kimmel \/ Flickr <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Democratic senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is expected to announce her plan for a new wealth tax that will affect the richest 0.1% of Americans. The tax is intended to help curb America\u2019s astronomical gap in income equality. The wealthiest 1% of American households now hold 40% of the country\u2019s wealth, the largest…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}