Cutting taxes for the rich over the past 40-plus years has had a huge impact, leaving less money for public programs that benefit millions of Americans while enriching a tiny percentage of the population, reports James Steele. As average people struggle, the wealthy and big businesses benefit.
On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we discuss an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity about how decades of tax cuts for the rich fuel income and wealth inequality. In 1980, the top income tax rate for individuals was 70%. Today it’s 37%.
If the 70% rate were still on the books, taxpayers with more than $1 million in income in 2019 could have owed $87.9 billion more in taxes that year, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of IRS data. That’s more than enough money to rebuild and repair all the bridges and water systems across the country slated for work under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2021.
How has the US tax laws led to wealth and income inequality? And how should the media cover the relationship between taxes and widening inequality?
Guest:
James Steele, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, and co-author of America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens