John,

With $20 trillion in wealth, the top 0.1% (1 in 1000) of Americans owns 14% of all the wealth in America. This is up from 9% in 1990 and is at the highest point on record. In fact, only the uppermost brackets of 0.1% and 1% of Americans have seen their percentage of the nation’s wealth increase since 1990. That's it.

No wonder most Americans feel the game is rigged! To maintain their advantages, the wealthy use their outsized influence to try to gut programs that benefit the rest of us, such as Social Security and Medicare, and to avoid paying their own fair share of taxes, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.

That’s why Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and Brendan Boyle have proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. This legislation would apply a 2% tax on the wealth of families with holdings between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 3% tax on billionaires. These two brackets represent just the wealthiest 0.05% of Americans, or 100,000 families.

The bill would bring in at least $3 trillion over the next decade, without any increase in taxes for 9,995 of 10,000 households -- those of us with net worth under $50 million. We could take Social Security and Medicare off the chopping block forever, and start to achieve a better balance of wealth and influence in the country.

Grassroots co-sponsor Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act to fix the imbalances in our tax code, and require the wealthiest of households to finally pay what they owe in taxes now

In the ten years between 2010 and 2020, while IRS funding was systematically smothered by the wealthy, audits of millionaires and billionaires dropped by 92%. This bill would correct this trend by providing the IRS with $100 billion to enforce the tax, including requiring audits of 30% of these ultra-wealthy families every year to ensure they don’t cheat on their taxes.

Over the first five years since the Trump-GOP tax scam became law, the wealth of America’s 741 billionaires grew to $5.2 trillion, a 78% increase. Billionaires used this record wealth -- not taxed as income -- to give $1 billion dollars (the most in history) to right wing candidates who want to cut taxes further on the wealthy, and to cut benefits and essential rights for everyone else.

Meanwhile, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans is greater than that of all 10 million Black households in the country. This legislation would go a long way toward helping achieve racial justice for people of color throughout the U.S.

Who can forget Trump saying that not paying his taxes “makes me smart”? It’s time for the rest of us to get smart about these revenues and pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act now.

Thank you for fighting for economic justice!

- DFA AF Team