No surprise here either: American billionaires have never had it so good – they’re actually paying a lower tax rate than the working class, according to two economists exposing the real beneficiaries of a system that has redistributed wealth to the top.
The 400 wealthiest families in the US paid a lower effective tax rate than working class families for the first time last year, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley have claimed in their forthcoming book ‘The Triumph of Injustice’.
Billionaires, they say, were taxed at 23 percent, while working class families were taxed at 24.2 percent. Their calculations take into account state, local, and federal taxes, corporate taxes..
While American income inequality was already considered to be at peak levels, Saez and Zucman cite the 2017 tax cuts that primarily benefited the rich and Big Business as the “tipping point” that has made the degree of inequality impossible to ignore – or allow to continue.
Decades of “trickle-down” economic policies, driven by economists who believed easing the tax burden on wealthy “job creators” would improve the fortunes of even the poorest citizens, have reduced the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans from 70 percent in 1950 to just over one-third of that.
The rich have seen not only their income tax rate lowered, but capital gains and estate taxes slashed.
Those who oppose a wealth tax on the principle that wealth redistribution smacks of socialism or excessive government interference must ignore the massive redistribution of wealth that has occurred over the last 70 years, as income for the middle and working class has plummeted and the rich have gotten significantly richer.
