Tag: center for budget and policy priorities
Hillary Clinton Proposes 65 Percent Tax On Billionaire Estates

Hillary Clinton Proposes 65 Percent Tax On Billionaire Estates

By Emily Stephenson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Thursday proposed raising taxes on inherited property to 65 percent for the largest estates as she bolstered plans for tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans.

Known by conservative opponents as the “death tax,” the estate tax, levied on property such as cash, real estate, stock or other assets transferred from deceased persons to heirs, currently is imposed only on inherited assets worth $5.45 million or more for an individual.

Clinton’s plan, posted on her campaign’s website, would raise the estate tax from the current 40 percent to 45 percent, the rate that existed in 2009. But the biggest estates would face rates of up to 65 percent for property valued at more than $500 million for a single person or $1 billion per couple, under her proposal, an update of an earlier plan.

Clinton’s proposed top rate of 65 percent would be the highest estate tax since the 1980s, and is in line with a proposal made during the Democratic primaries by her former rival for the party’s presidential nomination, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

Her campaign said the boosted estate tax and a change in the rules to tax capital gains associated with inherited assets would help pay for other proposals to benefit middle-class people, such as expanding a tax credit for working parents.

Clinton’s campaign said the plan would hit only the wealthiest people.

“Hillary Clinton has made a commitment throughout this campaign to make sure there is a plan to pay for the progressive policies we have laid out,” said Mike Shapiro, an economic adviser to Clinton.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group focused on budget issues, said Clinton’s new tax proposals including the estate tax changes, taxes on capital gains of inherited assets and other provisions would together raise $260 billion in revenue over a decade.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a wealthy real estate developer, wants to eliminate the estate tax. Clinton’s proposal prompted criticism from conservatives ahead of her first debate with Trump on Monday night at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, issued a statement decrying Clinton’s “dramatic hike in the death tax.”

Republicans want to eliminate estate taxes altogether because they believe the system penalizes families who want to pass down businesses, said U.S. Representative Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee.

Brady said in a statement that Clinton’s plan was “dead on arrival.”

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said this month that only the estates of the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans, about two out of every 1,000 people who die, currently owe any estate tax because the first $5.45 million per person is exempt. Clinton would lower that exemption to $3.5 million.

(Reporting by Emily Stephenson, Steve Holland and Amanda Becker; Editing by Will Dunham)

IMAGE: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gives a thumbs up as she boards her campaign plane in White Plains, New York, United States September 15, 2016, to resume her campaign schedule following a bout with pneumonia.  REUTERS/Brian Snyder

GOP to Unemployed: Drop Dead

The federal government partners with the states in providing unemployment benefits, a system that has been strained since the recession began in 2007, especially since it was not adequately buttressed by the heady days of the 1990s or the mid 2000s. These benefits are highly stimulative, in that they tend to be spent immediately, injecting money into the economy. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has a report out on Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Michigan Rep. Dave Camp’s bill to essentially end the federal government’s responsibility to provide these benefits through 2011 to the long-term jobless:

Unfortunately, the Camp-Hatch legislation (the Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Services Act of 2011, HR 1745) follows a misguided course…As noted, it would renege on the federal government’s commitment to provide UI benefits for the long-term unemployed through 2011 and would instead transfer $31 billion — the amount the federal government is currently estimated to spend on these benefits through the rest of the year — to the states, which would be free to use the funds for a range of purposes. States could elect to use the funds to continue providing benefits for the long-term unemployed, but they would be under no requirement to do so.

Rather than passing actual stimulus legislation, providing Social Security recipients with extra help, or boosting unemployment benefits, the Congressional GOP seems only able to think of ways to shift social safety net spending to states, where right-wing governors would likely do just about anything possible before appropriating the funds for the unemployed. [CBPP]