You're listening to the Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor

Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the

Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU, and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And today we're talking about the ongoing debate over the Biden Reconciliation Budget Bill, which is set to feature many tax changes ostensibly aimed at taxing the rich.

Now the details are still a bit of a moving target, but at the time we're recording this, it appears as though we may see tax increases for those with

earnings above $400,000 both in the top income and capital gains rates and

income tax surcharge for those earning above $5 million.

The corporate tax rate, which is at 21%,

being proposed to go up to 26.5%.

And on the other side of things, it looks like the cap

on the salt deduction may be

repealed so there's a lot to talk about and Richard this is the Democrats best

chance in a long time to completely rework the tax code and this is what they're

coming up with so my first question is simply

this. Do you think progressives are happy with how this bill is turning out and are you happy

with it? Well I think we're both unhappy but for very different reasons. I think many of the

many of the difficulties that you see on the progressive side is that

what a Biden has abandoned is two provisions that they supported very strongly

one is a kind of a universal

wealth tax which would say we don't care whether you earn or don't earn it any

given year if you're above 50 million dollars in that worth what you have to do is to pay so much into the government.

If you're over a billion, you have to pay that much more, 3% or whatever it is, raised to 6%.

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