65% Estate Tax Proposal

quote:

---

“Unless we reduce skyrocketing wealth and income inequality,” he declared, “unless we end the ability of the super-rich to buy elections, the United States will be well on its way toward becoming an oligarchic form of society where almost all power rests with the billionaire class.”

Sanders thinks a new, stronger estate tax could stave off that sort of dystopian future – and help with other problems, too. “A progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires is the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower our $17 trillion national debt and raise the resources we need for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities,” he argued.

Sanders may be right. But if he really wants to advance the case for remaking the estate tax (and undoing the damage done to it during the 2000s), he should talk less about redistributing wealth and more about shifting the tax burden.

Sanders likes to cast his proposal in grand historical terms, laying claim to a distinctly American tradition of progressive tax reform. “More than a century ago,” he wrote, “President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the danger of massive wealth and income inequality and what it meant to the economic and political well-being of the country. In addition to busting up the big trusts of his time, he fought for the creation of a progressive estate tax to reduce the enormous concentration of wealth that existed during the Gilded Age.”

---