Tax Reform

Taxes are at historical lows. In the 1950’s, the highest individual tax rate was 90%! (NOT A TYPO). Today, the top individual tax rate is 37%. While a middle-class family might not feel like they have had their taxes lowered, it is because they haven’t. Tax rates for the upper class and high income earners has decreased drastically, while middle-class Americans have had theirs cut nominally. This is not right.

This decrease in tax revenue has led to not only a huge gap between the ultra-rich (think Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) and the Middle-Class, but also to a lack of funding for basic federal programs, including education, infrastructure, among others. We must reform our tax laws that ensure those who have taken advantage of the system for too long. This includes:

  • New taxes on billionaires

    • For the first time in the history of the United States, billionaires had a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans.

    • In the 1960’s, the richest 400 Americans paid more than half their income in taxes.

    • Today, the superrich control a greater share of America’s wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers. That's partly because taxes on the wealthy have cratered. In 2018, America's top billionaires paid just 23 percent of their income in taxes.

    • Introduce a 60% billionaire tax rate and 75% tax rate on net worths over $100 billion. This tax only affects roughly 800 people in the United States, and would raise billions of dollars, if not trillions to help fund education, infrastructure, and other government projects in our local communities.

  • Cutting taxes for middle class families/individuals & low-income families/individuals earning less than $250,000/year

  • NO new taxes on any family earning less than $400,000/year

  • Raise the corporate tax rate to 25%, up from the current 21%

  • Eliminate government subsidies for multi-national corporations, who refuse to pay their employees a living wage and force their employees to rely on other government subsidies, such as food stamps and medicaid

  • Eliminate corporate tax loopholes, that allow corporations to write off private jets, and pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars, while paying $0 in Federal Taxes