The founders of our country declared their independence from what they viewed as a tyrannical aristocracy in England. More than two centuries later, today’s tyrannical aristocracy is no longer a foreign power. It’s an American billionaire class which has unprecedented economic and political influence over all of our lives.
Unless we reduce skyrocketing wealth and income inequality, unless we end the ability of the super-rich to buy elections, the United States will be well on its way toward becoming an oligarchic form of society where almost all power rests with the billionaire class.
In the year 2014, the U.S. has by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth. This inequality is worse than at any time in our country’s history since 1928. Today, the top 1 percent owns about 37 percent of the total wealth in this country. The bottom 60 percent owns only 1.7 percent of our nation’s wealth.
At a time median family income is $5,000 less than it was in 1999, the net worth of the top 400 billionaires in this country has doubled over the past decade. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans and one family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.
In terms of income, the top 1 percent earns more than the bottom 50 percent. Since the Great Recession of 2008, 95 percent of all income gains in the U.S. have gone to the top 1 percent. While the rich have become even richer, more Americans are living in poverty than at any time in our nation’s history. Today, half of Americans have less than $10,000 in savings. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty — 22 percent — than any major country on earth.
More than a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the danger of massive wealth and income inequality and what it meant to the economic and political well-being of the country. In addition to busting up the big trusts of his time, he fought for the creation of a progressive estate tax to reduce the enormous concentration of wealth that existed during the Gilded Age.
“The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” the Republican president said. “The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is passed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in … a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”
Roosevelt spoke those words on Aug. 31, 1910. They are even more relevant today.
A progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires is the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower our $17 trillion national debt and raise the resources we need for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities.
I will shortly introduce legislation that will:
• Call for a progressive estate tax rate structure so that the super wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. The tax rate for the value of an estate above $3.5 million and below $10 million would be 40 percent. The tax rate on the value of estates above $10 million and below $50 million would be 50 percent, and the tax rate on the value of estates above $50 million would be 55 percent.
• Include a billionaire’s surtax of 10 percent. This surtax on the value of estates worth more than $1 billion would currently apply to fewer than 500 of the wealthiest families in America worth more than $2 trillion.
• Close estate tax loopholes that have allowed the wealthy to avoid billions in estate taxes. Some of the wealthiest Americans in this country have exploited loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying an estimated $100 billion in estate taxes since 2000. My bill would close those loopholes.
• Exempt the first $3.5 million of an estate from federal taxation ($7 million for couples), the same exemption that existed in 2009. Under this legislation, 99.75 percent of Americans would not pay a penny in estate taxes.
This legislation would exempt more than 99.7 percent of Americans from paying any estate tax while ensuring that the wealthiest Americans in our country pay their fair share.
I agree with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who wrote, in support of this legislation, that America “is creating an aristocracy of wealth populated by heirs who don’t have to work for a living yet have great influence over how the nation’s productive assets are deployed.” He is right in calling the proposal that I’ve laid out “a welcome step toward reversing this trend.” Let’s fight together to see that it is implemented.
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3 Comments
Perhaps this article is intended to demonstrate the folly of redistributive schemes within a capitalist system. Public wealth management is this answer, not private wealth confiscation. Sanders proposes yet another bag man for the king scheme. Can anyone demonstrate a correlation between this neo-stamp act nonsense and the actual improvement of life for those at the bottom?
One more thing. It seems like conservatives are starting collectivist conversations by simply asking the question: Is the private ownership of EVERYTHING always the best answer?
It’s curious that someone who supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and war in the Middle East in general, is given a platform on Znet from which to propagate his populist progressive rhetoric. As if Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, represent some meaningful hopeful change. Can’t an anti-capitalist Left website provide better narratives than this.
Surely Sanders must know we already have an oligarchic society, a plutocracy. How could anyone spend as many years in the senate has he has and not know this, unless they too are as thoroughly indoctrinated. Sanders’ legislative bullet points will never survive the senate and he knows it, which makes the whole thing a deceit.
John, thanx for pointing out the ploys of fox in the hen house.. I don’t get what ZNet is trying to do here. Maybe supporting a “Progressive” in a run for the 2016 campaign? …very weak on their part (let alone on Huffington Post). Reading this article twice didn’t change my inkling about this man. Shallow is his Platform that supports the poor and the oppressed when you consider his entire record. A thorough read of the following article:
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/610/610_11_BernieSanders.shtml
is an absolute essential when it comes to a Sanders campaign.