Sanders Goes For The Jugular: Could Slap Billionaires With 97.5% Effective Tax Rate

by Zero Hedge - October 15th, 2019 10:14 pm

Courtesy of ZeroHedge View original post here.

Billionaires could be slapped with an effective tax rate of 97.5% if Bernie Sanders wins the 2020 presidential elections, reported Bloomberg, who spoke with two economists advising both the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Presidential Campaigns.

Sanders' effective tax rate of 97.5%, includes an income tax, but also a wealth tax that is aimed at breaking up family fortunes over time.

"With the wealth tax, you get directly at the stock instead of hitting the flow of income, making it a much more powerful de-concentration tool than income taxes," University of California, Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez wrote in an email. 

Saez said Sanders' wealth tax would slash the number of billionaires in the country by at least half by 2030. 

Sander's proposed average tax rate for the wealthy is a steep increase from today's 23% tax rate and Elizabeth Warren's proposed 62% average tax rate. Judging by tax plans for the rich below, Sanders has the highest (97.5%), and President Trump has the lowest (23.5%).

If whatever reason President Trump is impeached and or the economy implodes before the election, wealthy Americans better hope Joe Biden is elected. 

Biden's effective tax rate is 30.6%, about seven percentage points higher than President Trump's, but significantly lower than Sanders' and Warren's.

The effective average tax rates of Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Trump was published in a new report titled "The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay."

Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both economists at the University of California, Berkeley, authored the report, said federal taxes, state, local, and health insurance premiums were used to calculate each candidates' effective tax rates. 

Judging by the decades of failed trickle-down economics and monetary policy, which created the most significant wealth inequality gap in the history of the modern world, it's likely that today's effective average tax rate of 23% will likely increase through the 2020s as the government's budget balloons.