Wealth Taxes

Note: To make room for coverage of the Covid-19 crisis we have temporarily reconfigured our Green New Deal header page as a sub-page of Wealth Taxes. You may access our GND page from the Wealth Taxes header or directly via this link.

This new section of CTC’s Web site covers the rationales for and means by which U.S. taxes on extreme wealth can pay for new sustainable infrastructure decarbonizing the U.S. economy (the Green New Deal).

This page is mostly just a landing point for our material on wealth taxes. The full action is in the sub-pages which you can access via the links below or by returning to this site’s Home Page and hovering over the Wealth Taxes button to activate the pull-down menu for the sub-pages.

Throughout this section we draw heavily from research and writing by U-C Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. By incorporating state and local taxes, which tend to be highly regressive, by finely parsing tax incidence at the summit of the income pyramid, and by estimating changes in taxes from Trump’s tax giveaways enacted at the end of 2017, the two have created a portrait of U.S. taxation inequality that is uniquely rigorous — and stark. (More in Saez and Zucman’s October 2019 op-ed, “How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice.”)

Our first sub-page, Inequality Basics, outlines the discussion of economic inequality that surfaced around 2011 and now, in 2020, is a dominant strain in American political discourse.

The next, Taxing Extreme Wealth, is a guide to the promises and pitfalls of varying approaches to extracting tax revenue from (and reducing the unconscionably large magnitudes of) America’s biggest family fortunes.

The Public Opinion page reports polling data and other indicators of public sentiment on taxing the wealthiest U.S. households.

Future pages will elaborate on this material, including the necessity and morality of wealth taxes as well as quantification of revenues depending on particular tax scenarios.