For decades, time and again, America’s tax code has been twisted and tweaked to give tax breaks to the top and crumbs (or nothing) to the tens of millions on the bottom and in the middle. Levels of wealth and inequality have become so gross that experts are clamoring for change, painting unflattering portraits of […]
Trump has an even worse one in mind nowTrump wants to put through another big tax cut for the wealthy before the election and Bloomberg News is reporting that the regime thinks it can be done without approval from Congress— which certainly wouldn’t be coming. The plan is “to cut taxes by indexing capital gains to inflation.
Billionaires back socialist politicians who are calling for higher taxes on members of the ultra-wealthy class because they understand they will never have to pay those taxes as the top federal income tax rate stops at $500.000, making it easier for millionaires and billionaires to avoid paying full freight.
Michael Hudson is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents. His most recent book is titled Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.
Here Hudson explains how economic terms like capital gains are deployed to mislead the public about who is benefiting from economic policy and where wealth is going.
