Liquidity issues would make President Joe Biden’s proposed “billionaire tax” difficult to execute, Tyler Goodspeed, former acting chairman and vice chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told Yahoo Finance Live in a recent interview.
“I think my main reaction is, it strikes me as a little bit gimmicky in an election year,” he said. “Look, if you think that billionaires should be paying more in taxes, then I think you should be seriously considering an elimination of the step up in basis at the time that the estate tax is levied.”
Biden’s 2023 proposed budget would impose a mandatory minimum tax rate of 20 percent of cumulative income, including unrealized investment income that currently is untaxed, for people worth more than $100 million.
“For too long, our tax code has rewarded wealth, not work, and contributed to growing income and wealth inequality in America,” The White House said in a press release. “Under current law, when an American worker earns a dollar of wages, that dollar is taxed as they earn it. But when a billionaire earns income because their investments increase in value, that gain is too often never taxed at all.”
