The plan would treat assets in a trust “as owned by the grantor of the trust (by the person giving assets to the trust) until that person’s death.”
In January, before he announced his presidential run, Sanders proposed expanding the estate tax, calling for a rate of 45% tax on the value of estates between $3.5 million and $10 million. That rate would increase gradually to 77% for amounts more than $1 billion.
Economists for the Sanders campaign estimate that had the wealth tax been enacted in 1982, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would be 40% of what it currently is, and they would have a net worth of $3 billion on average, instead of the average $7.2 billion they held last year.
“The share of wealth owned by the Forbes 400 would not have exploded and would only be slightly higher than it was in the early 1980s,” say economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez who analyzed the proposal for the campaign and designed Warren’s tax plan. “The current top 15 wealthiest Americans would own $196 billion (instead of the $943 billion they own in 2018).”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.