55 Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in federal taxes. The top 1% pays a lower effective rate than their secretaries. Here's a tax plan that raises $12.75 trillion over 10 years — by making the wealthy pay their share.
We're a policy platform with 50 researched positions on every major issue. This page breaks down our tax plan — but there's much more to explore.
Warren Buffett famously observed that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. This isn't an anomaly — it's how the system is designed. The wealthiest Americans routinely pay effective tax rates in the teens or single digits, while middle-class families pay 20-30% or more.
The reason is structural. The US tax code treats different types of income differently — and the type of income you earn depends almost entirely on how wealthy you already are. Wages and salaries, which make up most income for working Americans, are taxed at ordinary income rates up to 37%. But capital gains — the profits from selling stocks, real estate, and other assets — are taxed at a maximum of just 20%. Since the vast majority of billionaire income comes from capital gains, not wages, they face a structurally lower rate than their employees from the start.
But the real trick is even simpler: don't sell the assets at all. The buy-borrow-die strategy allows the ultra-wealthy to accumulate billions in gains, borrow against those gains to fund their lifestyles, and then pass the assets to their heirs with a stepped-up cost basis — meaning the gains are never taxed. Not at 20%. Not at 37%. At 0%.
The stepped-up basis loophole is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal code. When a billionaire dies holding $50 billion in appreciated stock, their heirs inherit that stock with a new cost basis equal to its current value. All of the gains accumulated over the billionaire's lifetime — decades of appreciation — are wiped from the tax rolls permanently. This single loophole costs the federal government an estimated $40-50 billion per year in lost revenue.
| Group | Top Marginal Rate | Effective Rate | Primary Income Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middle-class family | 22-24% | 14-18% | Wages (taxed at ordinary rates) |
| Top 1% earners | 37% | ~23% | Capital gains, dividends, pass-throughs |
| Billionaires (top 0.001%) | 20% (cap gains) | 8-12% | Unrealized gains + borrowing |
| 55 Fortune 500 companies | 21% | 0% | Deductions, credits, offshore profits |
Sources: IRS SOI data, ProPublica Tax Records Investigation, ITEP Corporate Tax Report. See the full taxation issue page for complete sourcing.
The Common Good tax plan is built on a simple principle: close the loopholes, tax wealth like work, and make corporations pay what they owe. Seven provisions, $12.75 trillion in new revenue over 10 years, and no tax increase on 95% of American households.
Each provision targets a specific structural failure in the current tax code. Together, they transform a system designed to protect accumulated wealth into one that funds public investment while preserving incentives for entrepreneurship and growth.
For the complete plan with legislative detail, revenue projections, and sourcing, see the full taxation issue page.
The Common Good tax plan raises an estimated $12.75 trillion in new revenue over 10 years. That's enough to fund universal healthcare, infrastructure investment, education reform, and significant deficit reduction — without raising taxes on the middle class.
The revenue comes from seven specific, scoreable sources. Each estimate is based on CBO, JCT, and independent analyses of comparable proposals. The total is conservative — it does not include dynamic revenue effects from increased economic participation, reduced healthcare costs, or improved infrastructure productivity.
| Revenue Source | 10-Year Revenue | Current Policy |
|---|---|---|
| Income tax reform (new brackets) | $3.5 trillion | Top rate 37%, no brackets above $578K |
| Capital gains as ordinary income (>$1M) | $2.5 trillion | Max 20% rate, deferral unlimited |
| Mark-to-market wealth tax ($100M+) | $3.0 trillion | No tax until realization (may be never) |
| Collateral loan rule + stepped-up basis | $1.5 trillion | Buy-borrow-die fully legal, gains erased at death |
| Corporate minimum effective rate (20%) | $1.85 trillion | 55 Fortune 500 cos. pay $0 |
| IRS enforcement (doubled funding) | $0.4 trillion | CBO estimates $200-400B from closing the $600B+ tax gap |
| Total New Revenue | $12.75 trillion | — |
For context, $12.75 trillion over 10 years is roughly $1.3 trillion per year in new revenue. That would be sufficient to fund universal healthcare (~$900 billion net new federal spending), a major infrastructure program (~$200 billion/year), and still contribute hundreds of billions to deficit reduction. See the budget and fiscal responsibility page for the full fiscal framework.
Sources: CBO revenue estimates, JCT scoring of comparable proposals, IRS enforcement ROI data, academic analyses of wealth tax and capital gains reform. See full issue page for detailed sourcing.
This is the most powerful myth in American tax policy — and the evidence overwhelmingly refutes it. The periods of highest economic growth in US history coincided with the highest marginal tax rates. The periods of lowest growth followed the largest tax cuts.
Under Bill Clinton, the top marginal rate was raised to 39.6%. The result: the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history, 23 million new jobs, rising wages across all income levels, and the only federal budget surplus in the last 50 years. Under George W. Bush, those rates were cut dramatically. The result: anemic job growth, wage stagnation, ballooning deficits, and ultimately the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Under Donald Trump, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the top rate to 37% and the corporate rate from 35% to 21%. The result: corporations used the savings primarily for stock buybacks ($1 trillion in 2018 alone), not investment or wages. The deficit exploded by $1.9 trillion.
The Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden, Norway — maintain top marginal rates between 50% and 60%, combined with robust social insurance programs funded by progressive taxation. Their economies consistently rank among the most competitive, most innovative, and most productive in the world. They have higher labor force participation, higher social mobility, and stronger small business formation rates than the United States.
The Kansas experiment provides the clearest single-state test case. In 2012, Governor Sam Brownback slashed income taxes dramatically, promising explosive growth. The result was catastrophic: revenue collapsed, schools were defunded, infrastructure crumbled, the state's credit rating was downgraded, and economic growth actually lagged behind neighboring states. The legislature — including Republicans — eventually reversed the cuts in a bipartisan override of Brownback's veto.
The evidence is clear: moderate, progressive tax increases on the wealthiest Americans do not harm economic growth. What harms growth is underinvestment in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and the workforce — the exact underinvestment that decades of tax cuts have produced. For more on fiscal policy, see the budget and fiscal responsibility page.
The United States collects less revenue as a share of GDP than nearly every other wealthy democracy. The result is chronic underinvestment in the public systems that other countries take for granted — universal healthcare, affordable education, modern infrastructure, and robust social safety nets.
| Country | Top Income Rate | Corporate Rate | Capital Gains | Revenue % GDP | Wealth Tax |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 37% | 21% | 20% | 27% | None |
| Denmark | 55.9% | 22% | 42% | 46% | None |
| Sweden | 52.3% | 20.6% | 30% | 43% | None (abolished) |
| Germany | 45% | 29.9% | 26.4% | 38% | None |
| France | 45% | 25% | 30% | 45% | Real estate only |
| Norway | 22% (+ 39.6% social) | 22% | 22% | 42% | 1.1% |
The pattern is stark. The United States has the lowest top income tax rate, the lowest capital gains rate, the lowest revenue as a share of GDP, and no wealth tax at all. Every other country on this list provides universal healthcare, affordable higher education, paid family leave, and robust retirement security. The US provides none of these — and the reason is not that Americans earn less or produce less. It's that the tax code collects less.
The Common Good tax plan would bring US revenue closer to the OECD average while still maintaining rates well below the Scandinavian level. For a detailed side-by-side comparison of party positions on taxation, see the Compare Parties page.
Buy-borrow-die is the single most important tax avoidance strategy used by the ultra-wealthy. It allows billionaires to accumulate unlimited wealth, access it tax-free, and pass it to their heirs without ever paying a dollar in capital gains tax. It is perfectly legal. And it is the primary reason the effective tax rate on billionaires is lower than the rate on their employees.
The strategy works in three steps, each exploiting a different feature of the tax code:
Step 1: Buy
Acquire assets that appreciate in value — stocks, real estate, private equity stakes, art. Under current law, these gains are not taxed until the asset is sold. A billionaire whose stock portfolio grows from $1 billion to $50 billion owes $0 in taxes on that $49 billion gain — as long as they never sell. This is called unrealized gains, and the tax code treats them as if they don't exist.
Step 2: Borrow
Instead of selling assets to fund your lifestyle (which would trigger capital gains tax), borrow against them. Banks are happy to lend at low interest rates to someone with $50 billion in collateral. The loan proceeds are not income — they're debt. So there's no tax. The interest on the loan is often tax-deductible. And the assets continue to appreciate, generating more untaxed wealth. A billionaire can borrow $500 million, spend it however they like, and owe nothing to the IRS.
Step 3: Die
When the billionaire dies, their heirs inherit the assets with a stepped-up cost basis. The cost basis resets to the current market value at the time of death. All of the gains accumulated over the billionaire's lifetime — the entire difference between what they originally paid and what the assets are now worth — are erased from the tax rolls permanently. The heirs can then sell the assets immediately, pay zero capital gains tax, use the proceeds to repay the loans, and keep the rest. The cycle is complete. Billions in wealth were accumulated, accessed, and transferred — and not a single dollar was ever taxed.
The Common Good plan closes all three steps. The mark-to-market wealth tax addresses Step 1 by taxing unrealized gains annually for individuals above $100M. The collateral loan rule addresses Step 2 by treating large loans against appreciated assets as taxable events. Eliminating the stepped-up basis addresses Step 3 by ensuring gains are never erased at death.
For the full legislative framework, see the taxation issue page and the policy paper.
The case against progressive taxation relies on a handful of arguments that sound intuitive but collapse under scrutiny. These myths have been repeated so often that they've become conventional wisdom — even though the evidence refutes every one of them.
Myth: "Tax cuts pay for themselves."
Reality: No major tax cut in modern American history has paid for itself through increased growth. The Reagan tax cuts tripled the national debt. The Bush tax cuts turned a surplus into a $1.2 trillion deficit. The Trump tax cuts added $1.9 trillion to the debt while producing no measurable increase in business investment beyond what was already trending. The Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Tax Policy Center have all confirmed this repeatedly. Supply-side economics is not a theory supported by evidence — it is a marketing strategy for wealth concentration.
Myth: "The wealthy already pay their fair share."
Reality: The top 1% pays about 42% of federal income taxes — a statistic that sounds impressive until you realize they earn 22% of all income and own 32% of all wealth. More importantly, their effective rate — what they actually pay as a share of their total income — is roughly 23%, lower than many middle-class families pay. For billionaires, ProPublica's investigation of leaked IRS data revealed effective rates as low as 0.1% to 3.4%. When you include unrealized gains, payroll taxes, and state/local taxes in the calculation, the US tax system is barely progressive at all — and for the very wealthiest, it is functionally regressive.
Myth: "Higher taxes will cause the wealthy to leave."
Reality: Decades of research on millionaire migration show that wealthy people rarely move in response to tax increases. Stanford economist Cristobal Young's research found that less than 2% of millionaires move across state lines after a tax increase. At the federal level, the US taxes citizens on worldwide income regardless of residence, and renouncing citizenship triggers an exit tax on all unrealized gains. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway maintain the highest tax rates in the developed world — and consistently rank among the best countries for entrepreneurship, innovation, and quality of life.
Myth: "Taxing corporations hurts workers."
Reality: When the corporate tax rate was cut from 35% to 21% in 2017, workers saw virtually none of the benefit. Corporations spent $1 trillion on stock buybacks in 2018 — enriching shareholders — while worker wages remained flat. The claim that corporate taxes are "passed on to workers" through lower wages is a theoretical argument that real-world data does not support. What does hurt workers is the chronic underfunding of public services — education, infrastructure, healthcare — that results when corporations pay $0 in federal taxes. For more on corporate accountability, see the corporate power issue page.
Click any question to expand the answer.
Have a question not answered here? Read the full taxation issue page or visit our site-wide FAQ.
Check back soon for policy analysis of tax news.
55 Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in federal taxes. Billionaires pay lower rates than their employees. The Common Good tax plan raises $12.75 trillion by making the wealthy pay their share — without raising taxes on 95% of households.