'They have the means to pay these taxes — and they'll have nine years to do it': Katie Porter on billionaire tax
March 28, 2022
Speaking to Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday night, Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) explained the recently proposed "billionaire tax" that would ensure a minimum tax rate of 20 percent for the top 0.01 percent of wage earners. There are under 750 billionaires in the United States, but this is already making most of them irate.
Porter explained that those who are already paying their taxes have nothing to worry about this would only raise the taxes on those skirting the rates.
"The basic idea here is that billionaires earned income net escaped the ordinary tax system," she explained. "For most of, us $1 we earn is $1 that we put on our tax returns. But for the ultra-wealthy, when they earn an extra dollar, it's $1 that they're able to defer taxation on. It is set aside, often for decades or generations and avoids taxation. So, this really does just accelerate those taxes so that they're paid evenly as they are earned, which is exactly what happens to the rest of us."
There's also a problem with the ultra-wealthy, who make their money in stock options, not actual cash. Then they can borrow money against those stocks. Those are going to be difficult to catch, she noted.
"To be clear, one of the reasons that we need to approach taxation through this minimum wealth tax, is that many of these people with their army a very talented lawyers and accountants — and through very careful ways that they structure with they receive from the corporations or places that they've worked or the businesses that they own — they may not have very high regular incomes. They make it most of their pay, for instance, and stop. And that's why even if we raised the top tax bracket higher and we probably should, it's hard to think about how high you would have to go to capture someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos," said Porter.
Watch the explanation below:
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