A millionaire is an individual whose net worth or wealth is equal to or exceeds one million units of currency. Depending on the currency, a certain level of prestige is associated with being a millionaire. Many national currencies have, or have had at various times, a low unit value, in many cases due to past inflation. It is much easier and less significant to be a millionaire in those currencies, thus a millionaire in Hong Kong or Taiwan, for example, may be merely averagely wealthy, or perhaps less wealthy than average. A millionaire in Zimbabwe in 2007 could have been extremely poor. Because of this, the term 'millionaire' generally refers to those whose assets total at least one million units of a high-value currency, such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling.
A wealth tax is a tax on an entity's holdings of assets or an entity's net worth. This includes the total value of personal assets, including cash, bank deposits, real estate, assets in insurance and pension plans, ownership of unincorporated businesses, financial securities, and personal trusts. Typically, wealth taxation often involves the exclusion of an individual's liabilities, such as mortgages and other debts, from their total assets. Accordingly, this type of taxation is frequently denoted as a netwealth tax.
High-net-worth individual (HNWI) is a technical term used in the financial services industry for people who maintain liquid assets at or above a certain threshold. Typically, they are defined as holding financial assets valued over US$1 million. A secondary level, a very-high-net-worth individual (VHNWI), refers to someone with a net worth of at least US$5 million. The terminal level, an ultra-high-net-worthindividual (UHNWI), holds US$30 million in investible assets. Individuals with a net worth of over US$1 billion are considered to occupy a special bracket of the UHNWI. These thresholds are broadly used in studies of wealth inequality, government regulation, investment suitability requirements, marketing, financing standards, and general corporate strategy.
Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy group founded in 1979 focusing on tax policies and their impact. CTJ's work focuses primarily on federal tax policy, but also analyzes state and local tax policies.
Barack Obama, President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, he made his presidential run in 2008. He was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012.
The Healthy Americans Act(HAA), also known as the Wyden-Bennett Act, is a Senate bill that had proposed to improve health care in the United States, with changes that included the establishment of universal health care. It would transition away from employer-provided health insurance, to employer-subsidized insurance, having instead individuals choose their health care plan from state-approved private insurers. It sought to make the cost of health insurance more transparent to consumers, with the expectation being that this would increase market pressures to drive health insurance costs down. The proposal created a system that would be paid for by both public and private contributions. It would establish Healthy Americans Private Insurance Plans (HAPIs) and require those who do not already have health insurance coverage, and who do not oppose health insurance on religious grounds, to enroll themselves and their children in a HAPI. According to its sponsors, it would guarantee universal, affordable, comprehensive, portable, high-quality, private health coverage that is as good or better than Members of Congress have today; A 2008 preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded it would be "essentially" self-financing in the first year that it was fully implemented.
William G. "Bill" Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and the former vice president and director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He conducts research on a variety of economic issues, focusing particularly on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behavior. He is also co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. Gale attended Duke University and the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987.
Income inequality has fluctuated considerably in the United States since measurements began around 1915, moving in an arc between peaks in the 1920s and 2000s, with a 30-year period of relatively lower inequality between 1950 and 1980.
The Competitive Tax Plan is an approach to taxation, suggested in the United States, that would impose a 10–15% value added tax (VAT) and reduce personal and corporate income taxes. The plan was created by Michael J. Graetz, a tax law professor at Columbia Law School and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy. Graetz states that the plan would generate enough revenue to exclude families earning less than $100,000 of annual income from having to pay income taxes or file tax returns. The Competitive Tax Plan would provide a new payroll tax offset to replace the Earned Income Tax Credit, protecting low and moderate income workers from any tax increase under the new system. Under the initial proposal, households with an annual income of more than $100,000 would be taxed at a flat 25% rate and the corporate income tax rate would be reduced to 25%. Graetz argues that reducing the corporate tax rate "would make the United States an extremely attractive nation for corporate investments for both U.S. citizens and foreign investors." In 2013, Graetz presented an updated version of his plan for 2015.
The inequality of wealth has substantially increased in the United States in recent decades. Wealth commonly includes the values of any homes, automobiles, personal valuables, businesses, savings, and investments, as well as any associated debts.
Emmanuel Saez is a French-American economist who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work, done with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, includes tracking the incomes of the poor, middle class and rich around the world. Their work shows that top earners in the United States have taken an increasingly larger share of overall income over the last three decades, with almost as much inequality as before the Great Depression. He recommends much higher marginal tax rates, of up to 70% or 90%. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2010, and an honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.
Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is a professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, associate chair at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Income inequality in India refers to the unequal distribution of wealth and income among its citizens. According to the CIA World Factbook, the Gini coefficient of India, which is a measure of income distribution inequality, was 35.2 in 2011, ranking 95th out of 157. Wealth distribution is also uneven, with one report estimating that 54% of the country's wealth is controlled by millionaires, the second highest after Russia, as of November 2016. The richest 1% of Indians own 58% of wealth, while the richest 10% of Indians own 80% of the wealth. This trend has consistently increased, meaning the rich are getting richer much faster than the poor, widening the income gap. Inequality worsened since the establishment of income tax in 1922, overtaking the British Raj's record of the share of the top 1% in national income, which was 20.7% in 1939–40.
Tax policy and economic inequality in the United States discusses how tax policy affects the distribution of income and wealth in the United States. Income inequality can be measured before- and after-tax; this article focuses on the after-tax aspects. Income tax rates applied to various income levels and tax expenditures primarily drive how market results are redistributed to impact the after-tax inequality. After-tax inequality has risen in the United States markedly since 1980, following a more egalitarian period following World War II.
Gabriel Zucman is a French economist who is currently an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley‘s Goldman School of Public Policy, Chaired Professor at the Paris School of Economics, and Director of the EU Tax Observatory.
The Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018, Pub. L. 115–97 (text)(PDF), is a congressional revenue act of the United States originally introduced in Congress as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), that amended the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. The legislation is commonly referred to in media as the Trump tax cuts. Major elements of the changes include reducing tax rates for corporations and individuals, increasing the standard deduction and family tax credits, eliminating personal exemptions and making it less beneficial to itemize deductions, limiting deductions for state and local income taxes and property taxes, further limiting the mortgage interest deduction, reducing the alternative minimum tax for individuals and eliminating it for corporations, doubling the estate tax exemption, and reducing the penalty for violating the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to $0. The New York Times has described the TCJA as "the most sweeping tax overhaul in decades".
The Wealth Tax Commission in the United Kingdom was a group of experts studying the desirability and feasibility of a wealth tax. The three Commissioners, Arun Advani, Emma Chamberlain and Andy Summers, cooperated with a large network of academics, policymakers and tax practitioners to produce an extensive evidence base on the wealth tax. The Commissioners’ final report was released in December 2020, recommending that, if the government wants to raise more tax revenue, the introduction of a one-off wealth tax would be preferred to increasing other taxes.
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021 is a proposed bill in the United States Congress, which would impose a tax on the wealth of the top 0.05% of Americans. The act was proposed and introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Representative Pramila Jayapal, and Representative Brendan Boyle. The bill mandates that any household or trust with any net worth between $50 million to $1 billion will be taxed 2% of their net worth annually and any household or trust surpassing $1 billion will have a surtax of 1%. Senator Warren expects the bill to raise $3 trillion in revenue over the next 10 years.
Beverly I. Moran is an American law professor. She is Professor Emerita of Law at Vanderbilt University. Moran was also a professor at the University of Wisconsin and served as director of the Wisconsin Center on Law and Africa. She has testified and written about tax havens.
Justin Miller is a nationally recognized authority on taxation in the United States. He is an attorney based in San Francisco, California and adjunct professor at Golden Gate University.
