A 90-year-old, a father of seven and a high-profile divorcee are among Americans who would face a new minimum tax under a proposal in US President Joe Biden’s budget.
The proposal aims to capture more of the wealth created by the stock market’s rapid growth in recent years.
It targets the 20,000 or so taxpayers in the US who are worth more than $100m (£76m).
Investor Warren Buffett, Tesla boss Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were among those affected.
Under the proposal, America’s 0.01% of the wealthiest would face an income tax rate of at least 20%. Crucially, the rules for calculating income will be changed to include gains on stocks even if they have not been sold by the taxed investor.
“This approach means that the very wealthy Americans pay taxes as they go, just like everyone else, and eliminates inefficient income protection for decades or generations,” the White House said.
The idea is the latest in a long list of efforts to raise taxes on the super-rich, and is facing a lot of opposition in Washington — not to mention the class opposition it’s designed to target.
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The Boston Consulting Group estimates that there are approximately 20,600 people worth more than $100 million in the United States.
The White House said more than half of the $360 billion raised from the measure over 10 years would come from the country’s roughly 700 billionaires.
“Eventually they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” Tesla boss and richest man alive Elon Musk wrote on Twitter last year of a similar proposal.
Under Mr. Biden’s proposal, Mr. Musk — a father of seven with a net worth of more than $280 billion at the University of California-Berkeley — would have to.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would face an additional bill of $35 billion, while Warren Buffett would be on the hook for $26 billion.
“This is big,” wrote Prof. Zucman on Twitter, who has researched billionaire wealth and helped draft a wealth tax proposal for left-leaning Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Mr. Biden’s budget also calls for raising the income tax rate for households with incomes over $400,000 from 37% to 39.6% and raising the tax on corporations to 28%, bringing those under the Trump administration some of the cuts made can be reversed.
He would also make other reforms to the system of taxing capital gains on stocks and property that would extend beyond the richest Americans.
Taken together, the reforms and others in the budget would help reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the White House.
An annual deficit of more than $1.2 trillion is forecast for fiscal 2022. Total debt surpassed $30 trillion last month.
Mr. Biden has long called for many of the tax changes in this year’s budget to no avail.
Other proposals in Congress to increase taxes on the wealthy met with little success.
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin — a key member of Mr Biden’s party who has blocked his broader agenda — said last year that a similar proposal by Sen. Ron Wyden was overly complicated and he “didn’t like the connotation”. We’re targeting different people.”
Other Democrats have raised concerns about the viability of other similar proposals and their ability to withstand legal challenges.
In a briefing for reporters Monday, Treasury Department officials said the goal is to advance discussions in Washington about how to ensure the rich pay their fair share.
According to a 2020 analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, America’s 400 wealthiest families have more wealth than all of the nation’s 10 million black families combined.
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