The Democratic presidential candidate is now calling for a 65 percent tax on the estates of billionaires, the same rate that Sanders, a democratic socialist, proposed in June, near the end of his campaign against Clinton.
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In total, Clinton’s tax code reforms would raise taxes by .5 trillion over the next decade, boosting overall tax receipts by about 4%.
The revision will put a 65 percent tax rate on estates valued at $1 billion or more per couple, the Clinton campaign said Thursday.
Under Clinton’s plan, investors would owe the tax whenever they inherited an appreciated asset, according the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The revenue raised from Clinton’s latest tax proposals would be used to pay for Clinton’s proposals to provide tax relief to small businesses and expand the child tax credit, the CRFB said.
Clinton’s new proposed rate marks a massive increase over the 45 percent tax she proposed earlier in the campaign.
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The campaign did say the plan would include “careful protections and flexibility for small and closely held businesses, farms and homes, and personal property and family heirlooms”. Supporters argue it is an essential tool to prevent the concentration of wealth in a few massively rich families. Under that rule, people who die with appreciated assets – for example, a stock bought decades ago – don’t have to pay the capital-gains taxes on the increase in value before death. The plan would also repeal a feature of the tax code known as the “step-up basis” that dramatically reduces capital gains tax bills heirs pay after inheriting valuable assets.
Under Mrs. Clinton’s plan and under a proposal from President Barack Obama that has gone nowhere in Congress, a bequest of an asset would be treated as realizing those pent-up gains. She would also lower the threshold for the tax from $5.45 million per individual to $3.5 million.
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Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman Jason Miller responded by saying, “It is the height of hypocrisy for Hillary Clinton to offer an even more dramatic hike in the death tax at the same time she uses exotic tax loopholes reserved for the very wealthy to exempt her Chappaqua estate”.
