Editor’s Note: Abigail Disney is an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, activist and patriotic millionaire. Her latest film, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Morris Pearl is the chairman of the patriotic millionaire and former managing director of Blackrock. The opinions expressed in this comment are their own. view More comments On CNN.
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Tuesday is tax day in the U.S., one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will eventually end the delay, file federal returns and hope to refund from the IRS. But for many of the wealthiest people in the United States, it’s just another Tuesday.
Tax days are not just application deadlines, but also remind people that when it comes to taxation, a super-rich world exists in a completely independent world. For us, the vulnerability is larger and sometimes the ratio is lower. At the same time, the rich are becoming more and more abundant wealth In the past few years, billionaires have grown in particular over $1.5 trillion.
This status quo is unfair, but more importantly, it is unsustainable. Such high inequality is pushing our economy and democracy to their breakthrough points. This is why we should look at how to set up a country for long-term stability and prosperity. We should first make sure that super-rich people pay more for the country they owe to successful.
There are three changes to the tax law that can help us do this:
Currently, the U.S. tax system values money rather than sweat. If you work hard for your money rather than passively earning money, you can be punished for it. Those who earn salaries earn much higher income than wealthy investors who make money passively Capital gains income.
Inheriting money is a better deal. Thanks to former President Donald Trump for his 2017 year Tax lawthe first batch of $12.92 million (or $25.84 million for married couples) is completely exempt from any Inheritance taxand Strengthen basic loopholes Allow wealthy families to permanently eliminate millions of taxes by resetting the market value of these assets to the value at the time of the original owner’s death. In this way, it becomes relatively simple for the rich to inherit hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, with little taxes. On the other hand, those who work for the money will pay a third of the fee with federal income tax.
Why do we have a tax law that says that workers should be taxed more than wealthy investors and those who are wealthy just because they were born in the right family? Ultimately, money is money, whether you come for it or inherit it. As heiress and investors, we should not pay lower tax rates than those who make money from work.
It is time for the tax law to tax more than $1 million at the same rate as ordinary income and tax on a simpler estate tax to treat inherited wealth as income.
But we can’t just focus on income, because many wealthy Americans basically don’t have any tax revenue in a typical year. Capital gains are taxable only when assets are sold, so super-rich assets borrow their assets as collateral, borrow a large amount of money at extremely low interest rates, and then declare little or even negative “income” on their tax statements. this”Buy, borrow, dieStrategies are the main reason why billionaires pay Reduce effective tax rates In recent years, it is better than the working-class family.
By rethinking the taxable issue, we have access to trillions of billions of billionaires’ wealth that cannot be reached under our current tax structure. This is why President Biden proposed it Minimum income tax for billionaireswhich would tax unrealized capital gains for the wealthiest families and why others proposed wealth taxes on billionaires.
Finally, one of the most direct changes required is simply taxing more than just wealthy people. Our Income Tax Any income exceeding $578,125 (or $693,750 for married couples) has a maximum income of 37%. No matter someone has more production capacity, they won’t pay more than 37% federal income tax.
While people who earn $600,000 will certainly live a very comfortable life, their world is different from those who make $600 million a year. To reflect the actual difference between the rich and superwealth, we need to return Maximum rate We have experienced the most prosperous decades of the 20th century and have added more tax scope. For those who make over $100 million a year, they should reach 90%.
These three changes certainly won’t solve all the problems of our country on their own, but they will go a long way in preventing the steady flow of our country’s wealth to smaller and smaller people, and this change will make our democracy and our economy more stable. Tax laws can be a powerful tool for social and economic change. We just need to use it more efficiently.
