14/09/2021
With big tax push, Democrats aim to tackle enormous gains of top 1 percent
The package is a central component of their $3.5 trillion economic package, but they can’t proceed unless almost all Democrats coalesce.
Senior House Democrats on Monday unveiled legislation that would represent the most significant tax increases on the rich and certain corporations in decades, reflecting President Biden’s pledge to confront a dramatic surge in U.S. inequality.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) proposed more than $2 trillion in new revenue that would overwhelmingly hit the richest 1 percent of Americans with a bevy of new taxes and tax changes affecting their incomes, investments, businesses, estates, retirement funds and other assets.
House Democrats circulate new tax plan as party seeks unity on key economic package
Neal’s plan pares back some of the ambitions in the Biden administration’s initial $3.5 trillion tax plan, rejecting a key White House proposal to tax the inheritances of the very wealthy and offering less aggressive changes for both domestic and multinational firms. And Democrats still have not completely rallied behind the package yet, with some members studying the details as votes are expected in the coming days.
But economists and tax experts say the proposal — which has White House support — amounts to the first major effort in Congress to address the populist political fervor over the gap between America’s ultrarich and its middle-class that has widened to levels unseen in nearly a century. The fears of a tax system unduly weighted to the rich have only intensified during the pandemic. Since 2019 alone, the wealth controlled by the top 400 people in America increased by $1.4 trillion, according to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.
