SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
patriotic millionaires
'We Have Been Working Against That': Trump and Johnson Dump Cold Water on Millionaire Tax Hike
"We fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people," said one progressive campaigner.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump indicated in an interview published Friday that he's unlikely to push congressional Republicans to include a tax hike on millionaires in their sprawling reconciliation bill, saying he doesn't "want it to be used against me politically."
Trump's comments to TIME magazine came a day after he told reporters in the Oval Office that raising the statutory income tax rate on people who earn more than $1 million a year would be "very disruptive, because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country." (The notion of millionaire tax flight, often cited by Republicans as a reason not to raise taxes on the rich, has been repeatedly debunked.)
In recent weeks, pro-Trump figures such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and a small number of Republicans in Congress have floated the idea of slightly raising income taxes for millionaires, suggesting the move would help counter progressive attacks on Trump and his billionaire-stocked Cabinet as a manifestation of the United States' descent into oligarchy.
"This guts the AOC-Bernie 'oligarchy tour,'" Bannon toldThe Washington Post earlier this week. "Politically, it's game, set, match—it's a no-brainer. This would destroy the Democrats."
But Trump told TIME that he's concerned about political backlash stemming from any tax increase on millionaires, even as he acknowledged it "doesn't make that much of a difference" to the rich.
"I would be honored to pay more," said Trump, whose organization was convicted in 2022 of a long-running tax fraud scheme. "But I don't want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) toldFox News earlier this week that he "would not expect" a millionaire tax hike to wind up in the GOP reconciliation package, which is expected to extend the 2017 Trump-GOP tax breaks and enact an additional $1.5 trillion in tax cuts—paid for in part by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs.
"We have been working against that idea," Johnson added. "I'm not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging. They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Proposals floated by Republican lawmakers and discussed in Trump's inner circle in recent days include allowing the top marginal tax rate to revert to 39.6%—the level prior to enactment of the 2017 tax cuts—next year and establishing a new top marginal rate of 40%, which would do nothing to tax mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, whose wealth is mostly stock that's only taxed when sold.
The millionaire tax hike proposals have drawn vocal opposition from big business, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the nation's largest corporate lobbying group—joining a recent letter rejecting any proposed tax increase on millionaires.
David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told Common Dreams in an interview Friday that "even if they did put something like this in" the final reconciliation package, "it's really important to remember that the bill would still be overwhelmingly skewed to the rich."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging," said Kass. "They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams in an emailed statement that "while we are supportive of efforts to raise the income tax rate on millionaires, if past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we'll believe Republicans are serious about protecting working people from an unfair tax burden when we see it."
"As they prepare their bill for an early summer passage," said Pearl, "we fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Want Equitable Tax Policy? Listen to the Patriotic Millionaires, Not Donald Trump
The new Patriotic Millionaires tax plan isn’t going to become the law of the land anytime soon, but it could help refocus America’s political debate onto the dynamics that are threatening to destroy our democracy.
Apr 14, 2025
Republican leaders in Congress have been working feverishly over recent days to renew the rich people-friendly 2017 Trump tax cuts set to expire at this year’s end. Both the House and Senate have now passed bills that do that renewing—and also add in some assorted new goodies.
All that remains before this latest giveaway to grand fortune becomes law: a bit of dickering between House and Senate GOP leaders over the tax cut’s particulars and then President Donald Trump’s John Henry on whatever legislation that dickering ends up producing.
Trump can barely wait for the signing ceremony. But he’s also pushing for much more than an extension—and expansion—of those 2017 tax cuts. His ultimate goal: erasing taxes on income from the entire federal tax code.
Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.
“You know,” Trump told a press conference this past Tuesday, “our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff based. We had no income tax.”
Over those years, federal revenue most certainly did come mostly from tariffs. And those tariffs did work wonders—for the nation’s rich. Our original Gilded Age wealthy frolicked in an America where the rich and their corporations could essentially operate however they pleased. They could pay their workers precious little and cavalierly short-change consumers at every opportunity.
In that same America, the federal government did precious little to protect average Americans from greed and grasping—and even less to make their lives more economically secure.
Changing that profoundly unequal state of affairs took decades of organizing on the part of workers, farmers, and middle-class reformers. By 1913, that organizing had paid off. The ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that year gave Congress the authority to levy income taxes. By the end of World War I, America’s wealthy faced a 79% levy on their top tax-bracket income.
But the nation’s rich would come roaring back in the Roaring Twenties. America’s wealthiest flexed their political muscles enough to get that top tax rate down to 25%. They would go on to party hardy throughout that decade, right up until the 1929 stock market crash. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Trump so likes to trumpet helped turn that crash into the Great Depression.
Amid that unprecedented downturn, America’s grassroots would rise up and break the plutocratic lockgrip on public policy. Working people would gain collective bargaining rights. Seniors would gain Social Security. The super rich would gasp as federal tax rates on their top-bracket income jumped to over 90%.
The end result? By the mid-1950s, over half America’s households had money left over after meeting their most basic living expenses. No modern nation had ever before reached that status.
That share-the-wealth momentum, unfortunately, would soon begin ebbing. Since the late 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has detailed, only Americans of substantial means have been sharing in Corporate America’s economic bounty.
How can we change this top-heavy state of affairs? Last week, at an unusual conference in Washington, D.C., activists highlighted a detailed agenda for making America start working for all Americans, not just the wealthiest among us. What made this confab so unusual? The people who put it together all just happen to rate as wealthy themselves.
The sponsor of this How To Beat the Broligarchs gathering: Patriotic Millionaires, the national group that’s been organizing Americans of means to “tax the rich, pay the people, and spread the power” since 2010. This past week’s broligarch-bashing conference gave these millionaires—and activists and scholars equally interested in creating a more equal United States—a vibrant forum for sharing information, insights, and, most importantly, an ambitious gameplan for ending rule by the rich.
“Our economy should be judged on how well it takes care of working people,” as Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne notes, “not on how many billionaires it mints in a calendar day.”
To take better care of working people, the new Patriotic Millionaires economic plan, entitled America 250: The Money Agenda, proposes a “Cost of Living Tax Cut Act” that would exempt all annual income up to $41,600—the current cost of living for the typical American adult—from federal income tax.
Another Patriotic Millionaires-proposed piece of legislation, the “Cost of Living Wage Act,” would nearly triple the federal minimum wage, from $7.25 an hour to $20, a rate that would adjust every year to rising prices.
To help trim our richest down to something resembling democratic size—and offset the cost of exempting low incomes from income tax—the Patriotic Millionaires plan would also start subjecting millionaires to a surtax on their taxes due.
Another part of the plan would tax the capital gains millionaires pocket—their profits from buying and selling stocks and other assets—at the same rate as ordinary earned income. Still another plan section would essentially prevent the mostly tax-free intergenerational transfer of assets from the super rich to their super fortunate offspring.
What makes that prevention so important? Under current law, point out Patriotic Millionaires analyst Bob Lord and law professors Brian Galle and David Gamage in a new research paper, between 80 and 90% of the wealth “that rich families have set aside for their heirs will likely never be subject” to the over-a-century-old federal estate tax.
The first phase of the “Anti-Oligarchy Act” the Patriotic Millionaires plan is proposing would have all inheritances over $1 million taxed as ordinary income. This phase would also “impose a progressive tax on large sums of trust-held wealth to limit the accumulation of dynastic wealth.”
The second phase would seek to impose “a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans sufficient to reduce their wealth to a level in harmony with the ideals of democracy, amending the United States Constitution if necessary.”
The pollsters at Gallup have just asked Americans if they worry “a great deal”—or much less—about 16 different current-day concerns. Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.
The new Patriotic Millionaires tax plan obviously isn’t going to become the law of the land anytime soon. But the plan could help refocus America’s political debate onto the dynamics that are threatening to destroy our democracy. Let’s get that debate going. Soon.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Patriotic Millionaires Unveil Platform to 'Beat the Broligarchs'
"Our economy should be judged on how well it takes care of working people, not on how many billionaires it mints in a calendar day," said the founder of the economic justice group.
Apr 07, 2025
With economists warning that U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war will raise the cost of living for millions of American families and could soon fuel a recession, the economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires on Monday unveiled a "bold, surprisingly simple economic framework" to stop the oligarchy from amassing more power at the expense of working people and "permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people."
Four pieces of legislation would form the basis of America 250: The Money Agenda, which Patriotic Millionaires proposed at an "expert town hall" titled "How to Beat the Broligarchs."
The agenda would include:
- The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act, providing an exemption on federal taxes equal to the median cost of living for a single adult with no children—$41,600 per year—with the responsibility for those revenues shifted from the working class to the millionaire class with a millionaire surtax;
- The Cost of Living Wage Act, raising the minimum wage to $21 per hour to match the cost of living for a single adult with no kids;
- The Equal Tax Act, equalizing tax rates for capital gains and income over $1 million and closing the "stepped-up basis loophole" which minimizes "the tax obligations of the uberwealthy"; and
- The Anti-Oligarch Act, implementing significant taxes on the intergenerational transfer of wealth, on large sums of trust-held wealth, and on the true economic income of America's ultrarich to prevent further wealth concentration at the top, and taxing the wealth of the ultrarich sufficiently—including through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The latter proposal, said Patriotic Millionaires, "is a long overdue response to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' warning from a century ago: 'We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated into the hands of a few, but we can't have both.'"
"The extreme concentration of wealth has always, without fail, translated into an extreme concentration of political power. The stakes for the nation couldn't be more clear," said the group. "We must act immediately."
At the How to Beat the Broligarchs event on Monday, the group assembled experts including economist Stephanie Kelton, Helaine Olen of the American Economic Liberties Project, and historian Rutger Bregman to discuss how unchecked wealth in the U.S. has captured the political and judicial systems—with "broligarchs" like tech CEO Elon Musk and others "working to pull the strings of the government towards their interests at the expense of the American people."
"America's slide into oligarchy necessitates bold actions in order to reclaim democratic capitalism and forge a prosperous, equitable, and just future," said Erica Payne, founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires. "America 250: The Money Agenda is the only plan that will get us there. It will change not just our own lives, but the future and direction of our country. Our economy should be judged on how well it takes care of working people, not on how many billionaires it mints in a calendar day. By that measure, America is flunking its economics class. The only way to get better marks—and stop our country's slide into oligarchy—is by fixing our tax code."
Erica Payne: "This economy should be judged on how well it takes care of people, not on how many billionaires it prints in a calendar day. Every great country starts with a great economy." pic.twitter.com/DXofvmwYNO
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2025
Morris Pearl, board chair of the group, said that if Congress enacts the legislative agenda proposed on Monday, "we will build a community dedicated to the common purpose of improving the lives of all working people in our country—not just the ultrawealthy."
"America 250 will bring to account the politicians and their enablers who are sustaining our backwards status quo and demand better leaders to put us on a better, more sustainable path," said Pearl. "The time for economic exploitation is over."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular