Dear John,
While most ordinary working Americans file their taxes this week worrying whether they will owe more than they can afford, the wealthiest among us continue to rest easy. Over the last five decades, there has been a transfer of $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent in our country to the top 1 percent. This isn’t simply a byproduct of free market capitalism, it’s a soulless shakedown of America’s working class.
The narrative of just how badly we’re getting played is so prevalent in our consciousness, yet the political class has barely moved the needle when it comes to accountability. Individuals with immense personal resources, political clout, or a combination of both, continue to find ways to dodge paying their fair share in taxes. Even worse, many get away with, through legal loopholes, paying nothing at all. The most recent expression of this was the $2 trillion dollar tax cut in 2017, where 83 percent of every dollar went to the richest corporations and citizens in our nation. This massive theft of our public treasury merely continues a long-term trend of the maldistribution of wealth which is now worse than in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression.
While the wealthy avoid taxes, travel into space and enjoy their yachts, 40 percent of Americans can barely afford rent, food, healthcare and transportation costs. Thirty-seven million people live in poverty including eleven million children, while 103 million live in near poverty. Thirty-nine percent of Americans are skipping meals to make housing payments. Our government has sacrificed their interests to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed “economic royalists”.
The trillions of dollars that these economic royalists ransack from society by not paying taxes can be used to realize a new beginning for our nation. We can launch our country into the energy revolution with a Green New Deal. We can make sure every human being has access to affordable and quality healthcare. We can appropriately invest in future generations by making college free and eliminating all student debt.
But how do we change the course we are on?
To put it simply, we must become a fairer society. A society where the family you’re born into doesn’t condemn you to a life of poverty, nor guarantee you one of excess luxury at the expense of others. One where all people can have a decent and secure life.
As your president, I pledge to see this through. Not only will we make the wealthiest Americans finally pay their fair share of taxes, but we will also enact a wealth tax of two percent on those with assets over fifty million dollars and an additional one percent on assets over a billion dollars.
A Williamson administration will also roll back tax cuts to the wealthy, including restoring the estate tax to estates over $5 million. We will protect the middle class from tax hikes while repealing the 2017 Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. And we will close the loopholes that give big breaks to large corporations.
Can we do all this?
Yes, because it has been done before. Many of Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were initially ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but the court later reversed its decision and validated the key reforms. Throughout history, from FDR’S New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society, we invested in America, built the middle class, reduced poverty, and created Medicare and Medicaid. And we did it by making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes and building the strength of our unionized workforce.
This is our modern democratic right. It must be rekindled if we are to override the tyrannous effects of an authoritarian corporatism that has corrupted a government by the people, for the people. We need to rise up en masse and bring forward a new wave of leaders deeply dedicated to the democratic ideal.
As your President, I will be part of that new wave.
With gratitude and love,
