Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) defended her proposed Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which would tax the wealthiest 100,000 households in the nation.
Jayapal pushed back against the notion that her proposal is “confiscatory.” She argued the legislation is about “leveling the playing field.”
“You know, I just don’t see how you can say that two cents on every dollar over $50 million is confiscatory,” Jayapal asserted. “You still got 98 cents left on every dollar over a million. You got 97 cents left on every dollar over a billion. So, what we’re talking about is the very, very top number of families, 100,000 families, where wealth has been concentrated, and because in this country we’ve taxed income, we tax property as you know to some extent, but property for working families is a much, much bigger share of their total net worth than it is for the people at the very, very top of the scale, so all we’re talking about is leveling the playing field here and there’s nothing confiscatory about it.”
“I think if you look at the unintended consequences right now, they are substantial, which is that 130,000 families in the United States have the same wealth as 117 million families — that is the bottom 50% of all Americans,” she added. “So if you want to talk about unintended consequences, let’s talk about what’s happening right now. Let’s talk about the fact that in the last year during the COVID crisis as people have been … lining up around food banks.”
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