Taxes Paid By Billionaires Decreased 79% Since 1980; New Report

[appalachiablue]

'Taxes Paid By Billionaires Decreased 79 Percent Since 1980, as Percentage of Their Wealth' As we emerge from this pandemic, substantial tax increases are inevitable. Central to the program should be a tax that limits the hoarding of wealth by the billionaire class. Inequality.org, April 13, 2020. Excerpts:

...A new Institute for Policy Studies Inequality briefing paper, authored by Bob Lord, reveals that between 1980 and 2018, the taxes paid by America’s billionaires, when measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased a staggering 79 percent. (*Read the full Institute for Policy Studies paper)

The only appropriate metric by which to measure the tax burden on billionaires, the briefing paper explains, is the rate of tax they pay on their wealth. Unlike the rest of us, the living expenses of billionaires do not constrain their accumulation of wealth. Nor do they rely on their work to generate additional wealth. For billionaires, the accumulation of wealth is driven forward almost exclusively by the growth of their existing wealth and constrained almost exclusively by the tax they are required to pay. No matter how the taxes imposed on billionaires are determined – by income, consumption, property ownership, transfers by gift or bequest – they function only as a tax on wealth.

By allowing the tax burden of billionaires, as a percentage of their wealth, to plummet since 1980, policy makers have caused the nation’s wealth to concentrate obscenely at the very top. In the 12 years between 2006 and 2018, IPS reports, nearly 7 percent of America’s real increase in wealth, measured in 2018 dollars, went to the top 400 billionaires. If the pattern of the past four decades does not change, an even greater share of the nation’s newly created wealth over the next 12 years will flow to the billionaire class...

Read More, https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-wealth-tax/
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- Also: 'Inequality Propounded,' Patriotic Millionaires, April 1, 2020.
https://patrioticmillionaires.org/2020/04/01/inequality-propounded/

[Under The Radar]

1. Didn't that get reduced further in the 2018 tax bill??

[appalachiablue]

2. I think not, but I'm not sure on that point

[BigmanPigman]

3. 1980...figures.

"A new Institute for Policy Studies Inequality briefing paper, authored by Bob Lord, reveals that between 1980 and 2018, the taxes paid by America’s billionaires, when measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased a staggering 79 percent."

My entire adult life can be viewed as a GOP made nightmare. Even the few "good" years are quickly erased by the greedy, sociopathic GOP whenever they get into power.

[appalachiablue]

4. Yes they started planning to roll back FDR & LBJ programs

by the early 1970s bigtime-- decided to set up think tanks, influence the media and universities, deregulate industry and more.

As a mid boomer I benefitted but also experienced and survived the nasty, greed is good 1980s first hand, and up close primarily in DC and NY. Ugly stuff.

We're at the apex now of all that rw effort and dismantling and does it show. Immense pain and inequality-

[BigmanPigman]

5. "Immense Pain and Inequality"

Sounds like the new GOP catch-phrase. It certainly has been their motto since the early 70s. No wonder half the country is on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds or overdosing on pain killers. Want to reduce that number? Vote with the sense you were born with, America!!!

Almost 50 years of stupid is too much for the sanest person to manage and bare, too much.

[appalachiablue]

6. The US also has rising suicides, esp. for age 60+ and

life expectancy that's on the low end, esp. for a developed country and the richest in the world.

50 years of dumbing down, stupid is really showing in voting patterns and more.

I just read that civic studies in public school began to decline in the late 1950s, it's really showing.