Read the full opinion piece in “The Hill”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, in an op-ed in “The Hill,” Alan Davis highlighted how the “experiment in billionaire governance” we are currently living through underscores the consequences of our broken tax system. In the piece, Davis lays out how a new wealth tax proposal, coined “Five and Dime,” can combat the excessive wealth concentration corroding our democracy and stifling our economy.
This comes on the heels of sweeping tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy passing the House, now making their way through the Senate. Recent polling shows 57% of Americans oppose such tax cuts for the rich.
Excerpts from the piece are highlighted below:
“The good news is that the American public is souring on this arrangement [of failed trickle down economics] and seeing through [the ultra-wealthy’s] greedy charade. Approximately 300,000 American households with wealth exceeding $50 million are sitting on over $35 trillion — a total that is equivalent to the entire U.S. national debt and more than the value of all the goods and services produced in America.”
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“Such excessive concentration of wealth is the biggest threat facing our nation. It bestows a dangerous degree of economic and political power on a select few and arms them with the ability to distort our democracy and our economy for personal gain.
As billionaires tighten their grip on our economy and political system, lawmakers must consider sweeping tax reforms to counter this threat. And they need not worry about raising taxes on middle-class Americans or even households earning above $400,000; the immense concentration of wealth at the very top means that focusing solely on the top 0.1 percent of Americans would generate substantial revenue while leaving 99.9 percent of Americans completely untouched.
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“One mechanism for achieving this goal is a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy. The venerable Tax Policy Center recently released an analysis of a policy called the ‘Five and Dime tax.’ This proposal would impose a 5 percent tax on household wealth exceeding $50 million and a 10 percent tax on household wealth over $250 million. This tax would raise $6.8 trillion over ten years, slow the rate at which our nation mints new billionaires, and reduce billionaires’ share of total national wealth from 4 percent to 3 percent.”
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“A recent poll of voters in California’s 13th District, which elected President Trump and Rep. Adam Gray (D) in 2024, found that nearly two-thirds support taxing billionaires and 63 percent back the Five and Dime tax.”
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For more information about the Tax the Greedy Billionaires campaign, visit https://taxgreed.org/
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