credit, Reuters
Tesla boss Elon Musk complained on social media about proposals to tax Megarich
Some of the names known to the general public among Americans who may fall into a new tax bracket proposed by President Joe Biden.
The project aims to retain more liquidity resulting from the recovery of the stock markets in recent years.
The tax would go up on a very small number of people – just over 20,000 American taxpayers with fortunes over $100 million.
Investor Warren Buffett, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were among those affected.
Under the proposal, the richest 0.01% in America would pay a tax of at least 20% on their income.
The main change in the rules for calculating income. Dividends will be taxed even if the shares are not sold by the investor who will be taxed.
“This approach means that wealthier Americans pay taxes according to what they earn, like everyone else, and eliminates ineffective income protections that persist for decades or generations,” the White House said.
Obstacles
It is the latest in a long list of attempts to raise taxes on the super-rich. It faces major hurdles in Washington — not to mention the multi-millionaires who would be hurt by the measure.
There are 20,600 people in the United States worth more than $100 million, according to a Boston Consulting Group estimate.
According to the White House, more than half of the estimated $360 billion in revenue over 10 years, if approved, would come from about 700 billionaires residing in the United States.
“You run out of other people’s money for an hour and then they come after you,” Elon Musk, the president of Tesla and the world’s richest man, wrote on Twitter last year. It was attached to taxation similar to the current tax.
Under Biden’s proposal, Musk – a father of seven who earns more than $280 billion – would have to pay an additional $50 billion in taxes over 10 years, according to an analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, California. Berkeley.
Under the same calculation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will have to spend $35 billion and mega investor Warren Buffett another $26 billion.
“It’s no small feat,” Professor Zuckman, who has studied billionaire wealth and helped draft the wealth tax proposal for Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is on the far left of the Democratic Party, tweeted.
Biden’s proposal also calls for an increase in the income tax rate for families earning more than $400,000 — it would rise from the 37% rate to 39.6%.
The corporate tax will be raised to 28%, partly reflecting the cuts made under the Trump administration.
credit, Getty Images
Amazon owner Jeff Bezos with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez
Biden will also promote other reforms of the system to tax gains in the value of stock and property, which would not only apply to wealthier Americans.
In all, the changes will help reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the White House.
In 2022, the annual deficit is expected to reach more than $1.2 trillion. Total debt exceeded $30 trillion last month.
Biden has long called for fiscal changes that would affect this year’s budget, but to no avail.
In Congress, other proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy have had little success.
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin – a key member of Biden’s party who has put obstacles in the way of a broader proposal – said last year that a similar proposal made by colleague Ron Wyden was too complex and affected quite different people.
Other Democrats expressed concern about the usefulness of other bills on the table and the potential for legal challenges.
US Treasury officials said Monday that the goal is to advance the debate in Washington about how to make taxes the richest in the country more equitable.
The 400 richest families in the United States have more money than all of the country’s 10 million black residents, according to a 2020 analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
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