The no-new-taxes billionaire prime minister of Italy has had a change of heart. Silvio Berlusconi last week decreed a new 10 percent tax surcharge on incomes over 150,000 euros, about $215,000, and a hike in Italy’s tax on capital gains — now the lowest in Europe — from 12.5 to 20 percent. Behind the about-face: mounting pressure from Italian unions — and even some conservative politicos — for a much stiffer tax on the rich than Berlusconi announced Friday. The unions want a one-time 10 percent tax on wealth that exempts only the value of a family’s principal residence. Italy’s wealthiest 2 percent, bank officials note, currently hold enough wealth to totally eliminate the nation’s entire near 1.9 trillion euro — $2.7 trillion — debt. Berlusconi has vowed to never accept the union-backed wealth tax, or patrimoniale as Italians have now dubbed it . . .
How much could an Italian-style patrimoniale raise in the United States? The latest financial industry global wealth tally, released by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini this past June, offers some tantalizing hints. The study puts the combined wealth of North American households worth over $1 million — not counting residences, yachts, luxury cars, jewels, and artwork — at $11.6 trillion in 2010, with the vast bulk of these “investible assets” sitting in U.S. pockets. A one-time 10 percent wealth tax on America’s millionaire households, applied to these assets, would raise over $1 trillion, or almost as much in one year as the $1.2 trillion in deficit savings the congressional “super-committee” the debt ceiling deal established must now identify for the next ten years . . .
No one high up in U.S. political circles is talking wealth tax. But Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, is talking tax fairness. Under current law, income over $400,000 gets taxed at the same 35 percent rate as income over $400 million. Schakowsky's Fairness in Taxation Act would tax income over $1 million at a rate of at least 45 percent and income over $1 billion at 50 percent. The bill would also subject the capital gains and dividends that millionairs report, income now taxed at just 15 percent, to the same tax rates that apply to ordinary income. Schakowsky's tax bill would raise enough revenue to cover two-thirds of the $227-billion jobs bill she introduced last week. This new legislation, inspired by the grassroots Contract for the American Dream movement, would fund 2.2 million New Deal-style jobs for everything from building new public schools to staffing health clinics . . .
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