Broligarchy Watch

“Our economy should be judged on how well it cares for working people, rather than the number of billionaires it produces daily,” stated the leader of an economic justice organization.

Amid warnings from economists that President Donald Trump’s trade war could increase living costs for millions of American families and potentially trigger a recession, the economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires introduced a “bold, surprisingly straightforward economic strategy” on Monday. This plan aims to curb the growing power of the oligarchy and “permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people.”

The strategy, named America 250: The Money Agenda, was presented during an “expert town hall” event called “How to Beat the Broligarchs” and comprises four critical pieces of legislation:

• The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act, which exempts federal taxes up to the median living cost for a single adult without children—$41,600 annually—shifting the tax burden from the working class to the millionaire class through a surtax;
• The Cost of Living Wage Act, which increases the minimum wage to $21 per hour, aligning it with the living costs for a single adult without children;
• The Equal Tax Act, which synchronizes the tax rates for capital gains and incomes over $1 million and seals the “stepped-up basis loophole” that reduces the tax responsibilities of the ultra-wealthy; and
• The Anti-Oligarch Act, which imposes substantial taxes on the transfer of wealth across generations, on large trust-held fortunes, and on the real economic income of the ultra-rich to prevent further wealth accumulation at the top, including through a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

According to Patriotic Millionaires, the last proposal is a “long overdue response to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ century-old warning: ‘We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.'”