On June 12, 2015, Jesse Byrnes writes on The Hill:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Democratic presidential candidate, says he would support raising the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to over 50 percent.
“We’re working right now on a comprehensive tax package, which I suspect will, for the top marginal rates, go over 50 percent,” Sanders said on PBS’s “Charlie Rose“ program. The current top rate is 39.6 percent.
The self-described democratic socialist said he is running on a platform of “redistribution of wealth,” citing “grotesque levels of wealth inequality in this country.”
“It is time to redistribute money back to the working families of this country from the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and tax policy is one of the ways we do that,” Sanders told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt on the show.
Sanders also said he would raise the corporate tax rate, the highest in the developed world, even as the White House and many Republicans push to lower it. Sanders also said he wanted to close loopholes.
“If you look at the collective percentage of revenue coming in from corporations today, it is significantly lower than it was back in the 1950s,” he said. “I think it’s about 10 percent today.”
The Vermont senator is one of three declared Democratic challengers to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has led by at least 40 percentage points in most recent polls for her party’s presidential nomination.
Sanders pointed to recent polling to suggest his campaign could close the gap with Clinton. A Wisconsin straw poll out this week showed him finishing just 8 percentage points behind Clinton among Democrats in the state.
Sanders said Thursday he has raised more than $6 million since his campaign launched April 30, with donations averaging $40. He said he thinks his campaign can pull in $10 million by the end of the month.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/244811-sanders-floats-top-tax-rate-of-over-50-percent
What Bernie Sanders should advocate while building a new justice-committed leaders and activists movement is inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
He should propose the following:
- Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,
- Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,
- Encourage corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-voting, full-dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership,
- Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but
- Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.
- The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt, but the poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes.
- As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
- The Federal Reserve would stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and
- Begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to purposely acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
- The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets.
- The shares would be purchased using interest-free credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the added technology, renewable energy systems, manufacturing factories, rentable space for entrepreneurial endeavor and infrastructure, both repair and new, added to the economy.
- Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but
- Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate social monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
