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Look at what happened in Massachusetts and Washington. Not only did millionaires not flee the states imposing new taxes, but the states became richer.
Increasing taxes on high income earners helped raise revenue without hampering the wealth of the millionaire class in Massachusetts and Washington, according to a new policy brief from the Institute for Policy Studies and State Revenue Alliance.
A common counter to raising taxes on the rich is that they will simply flee their home states to jurisdictions with friendlier tax codes. While some tax migration is inevitable, the wealthy that move to avoid taxes represent a tiny percentage of their own social class. The top one percent are incentivized not to move because of family, social networks and local business knowledge.
Our findings support the case against tax flight: The number of individuals with a net worth of at least seven-figures continued to expand in both Massachusetts and Washington after tax hikes. The millionaire class has grown by 38.6 percent in Massachusetts and 46.9 percent in Washington over the past two years. The seven-figure clubs in those states saw their wealth grow by $580 million and $748 million, respectively.
We have witnessed a counterrevolution over the past 50 years where the nation’s wealth and income has concentrated at an extreme level in the hands of a small but powerful minority.
Not only did millionaires not flee the states imposing new taxes, but the states became richer. The four percent surtax on million-dollar incomes in Massachusetts and the seven percent tax on capital gains of $250,000 or more in Washington State succeeded in raising revenue — $2.2 billion for FY 2024 and $1.2 billion in its first two years of implementation, respectively.
These new resources have been invested in educational programs that support early learning, childcare, and free school lunches and community college. In the case of Massachusetts, some of the revenue collected is earmarked towards public transportation.
That experience contrasts with the failure of the Great Kansas Tax Cut Experiment that began in 2012. The Sunflower State lagged behind its neighbors in a number of economic categories and experienced revenue shortfalls. The experiment was abandoned five years later.
Lastly, the brief looks at the revenue potential of a wealth tax aimed at ultra-high net worth individuals. We identified individuals with $50 million or more in wealth across four states and estimated how much different taxes could raise. These individuals have the liquidity to pay and, as my colleague and former tax attorney Bob Lord has argued, need to have their rate of accumulation curbed.
A two percent wealth tax on this class of ultra-high net worth individuals has the potential to raise $7.4 billion in Massachusetts, $21.9 billion in New York, $700 million in Rhode Island, and $8.2 billion in Washington. This is a significant source of potential revenue that can be invested in a green transition, permanently affordable housing, and universal healthcare.
At the time of writing, legislators in Washington State are awaiting Governor Bob Ferguson’s signature to pass new taxes to help bring down their $16 billion budget deficit. Even a one-time 3% wealth tax could bring down the deficit from $16 billion to $3.7 billion.
We have witnessed a counterrevolution over the past 50 years where the nation’s wealth and income has concentrated at an extreme level in the hands of a small but powerful minority. They use their resources to increase their access to the state, buy up more assets, and squeeze the living standards of the working class. We have the policy tools at our disposal to reverse this trend. Let’s put progressive taxation to work.
Please ignore the tales of horror that apologists for the ultra-rich concoct to advocate against any meaningful tax increases on their deep-pocketed friends.
What is the mission of the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation? Even a quick review of the Tax Foundation’s output makes it perfectly plain: to help make average Americans see the richest among us as terribly overtaxed.
Hardly a Tax Foundation report goes by without one iteration or another of this overtaxed claim. Just last fall, the Tax Foundation produced a study that had billionaire Warren Buffett paying taxes at a rate of over 1,000 percent.
A few years back, early in the Biden years, I deconstructed another Tax Foundation claim, that the passage of tax changes the Biden White House was then pushing would leave the estate of a hypothetical taxpayer worth $100 million facing a tax rate of 61.1 percent. My response detailed the absurdity of that claim.
But what if that 61.1 percent had turned out to be an appropriate calculation? Would that 61.1 percent rate have really amounted to an oppressive tax levy? The Tax Foundation sure wants people to think so.
So let’s take a closer look at the Tax Foundation’s mythical ultra-rich taxpayer and let’s tweak the Tax Foundation’s hypothetical facts to make them just realistic enough to work with.
Suppose we assume our mythical taxpayer originally paid $1 million for the asset that ended up worth $100 million at her death 25 years later. That would leave $99 million of taxable gain. And a $1 million asset appreciating to $100 million after 25 years would have an average annual rate of return of 20.23 percent, a realistic rate for the sort of “home run investments” the ultra-rich actually make.
Let’s also ignore the exemption from federal estate tax — currently $14 million per individual, $28 million for a married couple — and treat the entire amount remaining from the $100 million after payment of income tax as subject to a 40 percent estate tax.
Applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology from that point, we would end up with a total effective tax rate just shy of 65.8 percent, nearly five percentage points higher than the 61.1 percent rate that had our friends at the Tax Foundation clutching their pearls. Wow! Sounds stunningly oppressive, huh?
Actually, no. The reason: The Tax Foundation’s presentation deceptively ignores the tax reduction magic of buy-hold for decades-sell, the tax loophole that causes the effective annual tax rate on the growth in the value of investments to decline as the rate of return and length of the holding period increase.
Our mythical taxpayer would be the quintessential beneficiary of this tax reduction magic. She would see her investment gains compound for 25 years without paying a nickel in income tax, all while her asset’s value was increasing by 20.23 percent per year.
The Tax Foundation, you see, makes quite the fuss over the one-time tax a mythical taxpayer’s estate would pay in the year of her death, but conveniently forgets about the taxpayer’s zero tax rate for the previous 25 years running.
That focus on a once-in-25-years tax payment ignores the full picture. To see that more clearly, consider the impact that a 65.8 percent tax would have on a mythical taxpayer’s overall investment return. At an after-tax annual rate of return of 15.18 percent, an asset with an initial value of $1 million will be worth $34.2 million in 25 years, exactly the amount left of the mythical taxpayer’s $100 million after her estate’s one-time tax payment of $65.8 million. That would be a 25 percent reduction in the pre-tax annual rate of return of 20.23 percent.
In other words, that supposedly onerous 65.8 percent tax at the time of the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer’s death translates to an effective annual tax rate of just 25 percent.
Had the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer been required to pay federal tax, covering both current income tax and future estate tax, at an annual rate of 25 percent on the growth in her investment’s value, and had she sold off just enough of the investment each year to pay the tax, her estate would be left with the same amount in the year of her death as it would have after paying the supposedly oppressive income and estate tax due under the terms of the Biden budget.
So, to review, the Tax Foundation concocted a hypothetical situation to show the proposals in Biden’s budget rated as extreme and oppressive. But even though that hypothetical is so concocted it couldn’t be found in the real-life situations of even the richest Americans, the supposedly oppressive one-time tax rate paid by the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer translates to a modest effective annual tax rate of just 25 percent.
The bottom line: Once we take into account the impact of buy-hold for decades-sell, the tales of horror that apologists for the ultra-rich concoct to advocate against any meaningful tax increases on their deep-pocketed friends turn out to be not at all horrible.
Unless you’re horrified at the prospect of a reformed tax system that prevents the already obscene concentration of American wealth from becoming even worse.
Will what’s left of American democracy survive for much longer if this wealth-concentrating trend continues?
In February, the economist Gabriel Zucman posted an absolutely stunning graphic online that depicts the wealth of America richest 0.00001% as a share of our nation’s total household wealth.
The share of American wealth held by the 19 lucky souls in this top 0.00001% now stands at 2%, a 10-fold increase from the share these deep pockets held over four decades ago in 1982. Collectively, as of this past December, these rich held $3.1 trillion of the country’s $146 trillion total household wealth.
If 2% doesn’t seem to you like all that much, consider that this $3.1 trillion amounts to one-50th of our country’s wealth. We have, of course, exactly 50 states. The 19 Americans in this top 0.00001% hold personal net worths ranging from $50 billion to $360 billion. They together control the same amount of wealth as an average American state—think Massachusetts or Indiana—with a population of about 7 million people.
And the growth of our top 0.00001%’s wealth share over the years has been geometric, not linear. If policy choices over the next 42 years allow the trend of the past 42 years to continue, our top 0.00001 percenters won’t merely increase their wealth share from 2 to 4%. They will be increasing their wealth share 10-fold, to about 20%.
Will what’s left of American democracy survive for much longer if this wealth-concentrating trend continues?
Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes.
Nearly a century ago, former Supreme Court jurist Louis Brandeis famously warned us: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
We’re now seeing the nightmare scenario Brandeis feared—an oligarchic subversion of American democracy—play out in real time. We can argue politely about whether any single billionaire represents a policy failure. But having our nation’s three richest billionaires—Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg—sitting front and center at the inauguration of a billionaire president sure looks like we have a president answerable to oligarchs, not America’s voters.
An extreme concentration of oligarchic-level wealth, Brandeis feared, can easily translate into an extreme concentration of political power. To believe that this concentration has not occurred here in the United States rates as totally delusional. Musk spent over $250 million on U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, less than one one-thousandth of his personal fortune, yet enough to overwhelm the campaign finance system.
Musk, maybe more significantly, used his control over a powerful social media platform, X, to promote Trump’s campaign. Bezos and another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiung, demanded that the editorial boards of the newspapers they own, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, not run editorials endorsing Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Let’s remember that each of the country’s four wealthiest Americans—Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ellison—controls at least one major media outlet or social media platform.
Let’s also remember that Musk, nearly immediately upon Trump taking office, began making unilateral decisions that are leading to the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers, the termination of life-saving foreign aid, and, if lawsuits don’t prevent it, the dismantling of entire federal agencies.
Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes. For nearly half a century, everything from wage and labor policies to antitrust enforcement and intellectual property and trade standards have been moving us in the direction of more concentrated wealth.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, the federal minimum wage today stands at half its 1968 level. Over the past 50 years, union density has plummeted. The market power in virtually every major industry now sits massively concentrated in just a handful of giant corporations.
Against all these trends, tax policy remains our last line of defense, our firewall against the power of our wealthiest.
Think about things this way: Our policy choices in areas outside taxes—labor, wages, antitrust—all impact our national concentration of income. These policy choices drive the sharing of our country’s income between labor and capital and between consumers and businesses. And these policies have been driving an ever larger share of our nation’s income to those at the top.
Tax policy, by contrast, governs the conversion of income into wealth. Without taxation, necessary living expenses would cause income and wealth inequality to deepen over time—because those with smaller incomes must devote a larger portion of their income to basic living expenses. The passive income generated by the resulting unequal distribution of wealth—dividends and interest income, for instance—then proceeds to drive income inequality still higher in future years, causing the sharing of income remaining after living expenses to become even more skewed in favor of our richest.
With these dynamics in play, progressive income and wealth taxation becomes a necessary counterbalance to income inequality. Absent progressive taxation, income and wealth inequality will continuously worsen. The greater the level of income inequality, the more progressive the system of taxation necessary to counteract that concentration.
From this perspective, America’s tax policy choices have been an abject failure for nearly 50 years. Our top 1%’s share of our country’s income has more than doubled since 1980. Our tax system has become hugely less progressive. Regressive taxes like federal payroll taxes and state-level sales and property taxes have increased, while the gains from federal income tax cuts have flowed disproportionately to those at the top.
Between 1980 and today, the top federal income tax rate on paycheck income—the only substantial income that flows to most American households—has fallen by about one-fourth, from 50% to 37%. But the decline in the top income tax rate on dividends—income that flows primarily to major corporate shareholders—has fallen from 70 to 20%.
And these numbers just describe the surface of our current tax-cut scene. The investment gains of the ultra-rich compound tax-free until the underlying investments get sold. At sale, these gains face a one-time tax rate of 23.8%. That 23.8% translates into an equivalent annual tax rate that can run under 5%. And if a rich investor dies with billions of untaxed capital gains, all those gains totally escape any income-tax levy.
A tax system, to effectively contain the concentration of a society’s wealth, must contain a mechanism to tax either wealth itself, the income from that wealth, or the intergenerational transfer of wealth—or some combination of the three. America’s current tax system falls short on all these counts.
The income subject to federal income tax often represents only a fraction of the actual economic income that’s filling American billionaire pockets. Investment gains go untaxed unless and until investment assets get sold. The federal estate and gift tax system—originally intended to tax the intergenerational transfer of wealth—stands eviscerated by a combination of cuts and the refusal of Congress to shut down avoidance strategies that tax lawyers have fine-tuned and court decisions have blessed.
Today, even billionaires can avoid federal estate and gift tax entirely.
Here’s how undertaxed our billionaires have become: In a study commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, four economists at the University of California-Berkeley analyzed the tax payments of the richest 0.001% of American tax units, about 380 taxpayers in all, a total that roughly matches the annual Forbes 400.
In 2019, this study found, those 380 deep pockets ended up paying in taxes federal, state, and foreign just 2% of their wealth. The average tax burden between 2018 and 2020 for those in the top 0.00005%—some 90 tax units—amounted to just 1% of their wealth.
Meanwhile, between 2014 and 2024, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 grew from $2.3 trillion to $5.4 trillion, an average annual growth rate, net of taxes and consumption spending, of 8.9%. The wealth of just the top 19 on the Forbes list over these years grew at an annual rate of over 12%.
So do the math: Oligarchic wealth in America is growing at a rate that dwarfs the actual tax rate upon that wealth. The oligarchic cancer destroying American democracy is continuing—and will continue—to metastasize.
Unless we rise up.