Taxes

"Here's the thing: the way the system is set up, we're headed for another decade of this." Exemplifying a national economy rigged in favor of the already rich, the wealthiest 400 people in the U.S. enjoyed a drop in their tax rate from 2009 to 2019 even as they enjoyed a drop in their tax rate. University of Calfornia Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman—citing the social media meme known as the “ten year challenge“—crunched the numbers Sunday in a tweet, finding that the total wealth of the 400 richest Americans jumped from $1.27 trillion to $2.96 trillion. The tax rate fell from 27% to 23% in that time.

For the first time in a century, the nation’s richest billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than working-class Americans, according to an analysis in a forthcoming book. The wealthiest 400 families paid an average effective tax rate of 23% last year ― the second year of President Donald Trump’s new tax law ― while the bottom half of all American households paid an average rate of 24.2%, according to the study. The superwealthy paid a lower rate than any other income group, according to an analysis in the new book “The Triumph of Injustice,” by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley.

Donald Trump tried to sell America on his 2017 tax bill by calling it a middle class tax cut, and regurgitating Reagan-era talking points about how tax cuts for the wealthy actually benefit everyone. As Heather Long warns in The Washington Post however, while some middle class families got a modest cut in 2018, in 2019, millions of Americans were—or were about to be—“surprised to learn that their refunds will be less than expected or that they owe money to the Internal Revenue Service.”