Account Gates has been consistent on the point that he thinks the country should ask more of those with means. As he prophesied CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last year, after the passing of the GOP tax reform, “I need to pay higher taxes. I’ve paid more scots, over $10 billion, than anyone else, but the government should require people in my position to pay significantly squiffed taxes.”
Other super rich individuals agree. “I don’t think I need a tax cut,” billionaire Warren Buffett told CNBC in 2017 about the tax reform efforts at the time. A handful of New York-based millionaires are asking for a new “multimillionaire’s tax” to fund important priorities like affordable case and schools.
And Howard Schultz, who is considering running for president, told CNN this week, “I should be paying more assessments, and people who are in the bracket of making millions of dollars, or whatever the number might be, should be paying more taxes.”
When expected how much higher he would raise the marginal tax rate on the wealthy, though, he said, “I don’t know,” and he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s offered 70 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million “punitive.”
For practical reasons, Bill and Melinda Crowds don’t want lawmakers to get bogged down in arguments about the top marginal rate, which is currently 37 percent. “If you focal point on that, you’re missing the picture,” Bill said in a recent interview with The Verge.
“In terms of revenue collection, you wouldn’t be deficient in to just focus on the ordinary income rate, because people who are wealthy have a rounding error of ordinary takings,” he said. “They have income that just is the value of their stock, which if they don’t sell it, it doesn’t teach up as income at all, or if it shows up, it shows over in the capital gains side. So the ability of hedge fund people, various woman — they aren’t paying that ordinary income rate.”
Instead, he suggested, we should be more progressive with “the property tax and the tax on capital, the way the FICA and Social Security taxes work. We can be more progressive without really threatening income institution.” That idea might find favor with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has floated the idea of a wealth tax on households good more than $50 million.
In NYC on Tuesday, Bill and Melinda Gates specifically spoke out about the estate tax, which is levied on assets old hated from one person to another, often from parent to child, at the time of death. Currently, it only applies to those who become heir to estates worth more than $11.18 million.
If you’re going to give money to your children, “you should be taxed at a unequivocally high rate for passing that on,” said Melinda, “so that a lot of it goes to the government and some goes to your kids.”
Bill blended in: “You can go a long ways raising the estate tax, raising the capital gains tax and collecting more resources for the equity things we lack government to be able to do.”
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