Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom - When 10% of the people in this country own two-thirds of the wealth, when we have minted the first trillionaire in human history, and yet your wages have stagnated, and your healthcare costs have skyrocketed, something is fundamentally broken.  It's time for a national billionaires’ tax and a new social compact.

So where do we go from here?

A national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern Buffett Rule — that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay.

End the “tax-free lifestyle loan.” It's the gimmick that lets the ultra-wealthy borrow against their stock portfolios while reporting no taxable income, and then pass the appreciated assets to their children with the gains untaxed.

Rewrite our inheritance rules. If we do not act, that transfer of wealth among the ultra-wealthy will lock in a permanent American aristocracy of inherited wealth, with all the political consequences the founders warned us about.

Return to pre-2017 corporate tax rates. Record corporate profits flowed into stock buybacks and executive compensation. Workers’ real wages stagnated, and vibrant middle-class communities were hollowed out.

Ensure every American owns a stake in the future being built by AI through a national public equity fund. It’s clear that we are entering an entirely new economic paradigm. Automation could create unfathomable growth, but who benefits from that wealth? We need to ensure every American owns a stake in the future being built by AI through a national public equity fund that takes a major stake in the new economy.

We are nearing the 250th anniversary of this country’s revolution. The system America’s founders built was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades. We can reverse it together, as a country.