Reply to "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]$50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations.[/quote]

Tax. The. Rich.[/quote]

PP here. I meant $50,000 per kid, not per year. Just correcting myself.

But: you can impoverish Bill Gates and his ilk but you're still not going to raise enough funding for this. You're going to have to dip way down into the middle class. I used to work on Social Security and people were always saying, just eliminate the cap on how you only have to pay the FICA tax on your income up to $133,000 (that's the 2020 limit, aka taxable maximum), so that Bill Gates pays that 12.4% tax on all of his millions of dollars of annual income. And then don't pay him benefits because he doesn't need it. That was never enough to fix even Social Security; all the modeling showed that you'd still have to raise taxes on people with incomes down to about $60,000 to raise sufficient funding to make Social Security solvent. And Social Security only provides about $14,000 a year to the elderly (nowhere close to $50,000), even as we're assuming the additional FICA tax revenue from taxing Bill Gates would also be annual.

People thought this was such an obvious fix, and so did I when I first heard it, but really careful modeling says otherwise. The one percent is actually less of a target than their individual massive wealth would lead us to think. I'm all for putting the estate tax thresholds back to where they used to be, at a million or so, FWIW.[/quote]

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