This is the Tom Hartman program.

And welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you.

Bunch going on that you know you all need to know about.

Michael Linden wrote a fascinating piece for the Guardian titled

What Could the US Afford if it Raised Billionaires Taxes? Now this of course is

what both Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren are proposing aggressively.

Now, keep in mind the average tax rate right now for wealthy people is around 30%.

The top marginal rate.

They pay nothing on the first.

These numbers are imaginary numbers, they're for like for example because

i don't have the tax tables in front of me but basically

if you're burning a million dollars here you pay no tax on your first

five or ten thousand dollars and then you pay you know ten percent

on the you know up to fifteen or eighteen thousand and then you pay twelve but you know

it's a graduated tax right it's progressive tax so when you finally hit five

hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars a year, then you're at 30%.

That's the top rate. And only your income over that rate gets taxed at that rate.

So if we were to raise that 30% top rate by 10%, so it's

still below 50%, it's still below the 74% that it was at when Reagan came

into office, it's still below the 91% rate that it was

at through the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower

and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter.

...