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wasoxygen  ·  2999 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Free Money

    We could tax wealth

We can plan on taxing income every year, but we can only tax a dollar of wealth once, then it's not available in following years.

Wealth is harder to measure than income, but I find a paper that appears to give a total national wealth held by individuals of $42 trillion in 2001. The rich (those in the top 5%) hold 57% of this, about $24 trillion. That's enough to keep the am_Unition plan going for six years or so before it runs out.

    Taxing that doesn't even come close to the tax burden we put on the middle class.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Depending on definitions, the middle class all together contributes more tax revenue than the most wealthy. But there are far more people in the middle class. If the tax burden is measured per capita, the wealthy pay far more.