Even the 1% Know They Aren’t Paying Their Fair Share: New Poll Shows 60% of Millionaires Support Warren’s Ultra-Wealth Tax

Posted at https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/12/even-1-know-they-arent-paying-their-fair-share-new-poll-shows-60-millionaires

Published on Wednesday, June 12, 2019 by Common Dreams

“A majority of Americans, even the 1% of us, know that our inequality is out of control and we need to make some big changes if we want to fix things.”

By Jon Queally, staff writer

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks onstage at the MoveOn Big Ideas Forum at The Warfield Theatre on June 01, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images for MoveOn)

“Taxing the rich is popular among… the rich!”

That was the comment from the Patriotic Millionaires, a group representing progressive people of wealth who call for higher taxes on themselves, in reaction to a new CNBC poll out Wednesday that showed a full 60 percent of millionaires surveyed voiced support for the wealth tax proposal put forward by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“A majority of Americans, even the 1% of us, know that our inequality is out of control and we need to make some big changes if we want to fix things,” the group said on Twitter.

According to CNBC:

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.

“Even the wealthy know they haven’t been paying their fair share,” tweeted Tax March, a progressive taxation and economic justice group which is spearheading an upcoming nationwide “Tax the Rich” tour.

As Common Dreams reported when she released the plan in January of this year, Warren’s proposal calls for a 2 percent tax on individual and family wealth over $50 million and 3 percent tax on wealth that exceeds $1 billion.

As economist and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich detailed earlier this year in a video and companion column, “Wealth isn’t like income.  Income is payment for work.  Wealth keeps growing automatically and exponentially because it’s parked in investments that generate even more wealth.”

Citing that estimate that a wealth tax like Warren’s could as much as $2.75 trillion dollars over the next decade—revenue that could be utilized for health care, education, infrastructure, and much else—Reich argues that “Not only would a wealth tax raise revenue and help bring the economy back into balance, but it would also protect our democracy by reducing the influence of the super-rich on our political system.”

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