One of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposals is a 2% levy on wealth or more than $50 million and 3% on wealth over $1 billion. The Democratic presidential candidate estimates this would apply to just 75,000 of the richest families and would raise $275 billion a year. Of course, just as they did with the the tax increase that Bill Clinton ushered into being in 1993, Republicans will claim that this would be the largest tax increase ever. In fact, the only tax legislation signed in Clinton’s two terms raised income taxes on just a sliver of the U.S. filers, 1.2 percent of American taxpayers, about 1.4 million of those who filed. The expansion of the earned income tax credit lowered taxes on 13 percent of the filers, about 15 million people.
While there’s been a flurry of attacks on Warren’s proposal, the idea of a wealth tax is showing itself to be popular except among Republicans, even though more than a third of them support the idea.
Robert Frank at CNBC reports—Most millionaires support a tax on wealth above $50 million, CNBC survey says:
Fully 60% of millionaires support Warren’s plan for taxing the wealth of those who have more than $50 million in assets, according to the CNBC Millionaire survey. The wealth tax is different from an income tax, since it taxes a family’s total holdings every year rather than their income.
Polls show that a majority of Americans also back a wealth tax. But the support from millionaires, some of whom would presumably pay the tax, shows that some millionaires are willing to accept higher taxes amidst growing concern over inequality and soaring fortunes of the rich.
While 88% of Democrats support the wealth tax, 62% of independents support it along with 36% of Republicans. Even the upper tier of millionaires, those worth more than $5 million, support a wealth tax, with two-thirds in favor. [...]
Some other data from that survey is not so surprising or encouraging:
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2013—Women's pay gap looks better because men's average pay has gotten worse:
As my colleague Laura Clawson wrote earlier this week, 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, 97 percent of women working full-time still earn less than their male counterparts. A number of reasons have been offered for this, but one of them is still, half a century after corrective measures were taken, outright discrimination.
Another round of proof came last October in a study by the American Association of University Women, Graduating to a Pay Gap. It showed, just one year after they obtained their diplomas, college-educated women were on average already making $7,600 less each year than their male counterparts. And that wasn't because they were having babies or because they all chose fields that were less lucrative. The reason for the lower pay was simply because they were female.
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:>However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.
With the exception of the period of labor market strength in the late 1990s, the median male wage, after adjusting for inflation, has decreased over essentially the entire period since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 1996, it dropped 11.5 percent, from $19.53 per hour to $17.27 per hour. With the strong labor market of the late 1990s, the median male wage partially rebounded to $18.93 by 2002. It then began declining again; at $18.03 per hour in 2012, the real wage of the median male was 4.7 percent below where it had been a decade earlier.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin reaffirms Trump's terrible polling outlook. Paula Writer discusses Dan Pfeiffer’s plan to win the impeachment fight. Chao steers DoT grants for her hubby. Trump rakes in still more emoluments. Russian trolling actually worse than first reported.