Slate on Hillary Clinton's "Really Progressive Tax Plan"

Apologies if this has been posted before, but I know there've been some questions about Clinton's economic agenda.

You Might Not Have Noticed, but Hillary Clinton Has a Really Progressive Tax Plan
(March 4, 2016)
By Jordan Weissmann

Hillary Clinton is running for president on an extremely progressive policy platform. This fact has been drowned out somewhat by Bernie Sanders’ calls for a social democratic revolution, not to mention the Trumpian drama that's on the verge of shredding the Republican Party to bits. But it’s true: While the message hasn't always come across very clearly, Clinton has campaigned on things like universal pre-K, guaranteed paid family leave, a significantly higher minimum wage, debt-free college tuition, and, to fund much of it, higher taxes on the wealthy.

And that tax plan is very progressive. On Thursday, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center released an analysis projecting that Clinton's plans would haul in more than $1 trillion in extra federal taxes over their first decade. More than 77 percent of that money would come from the top 1 percent of taxpayers; more than 50 percent would come from the top 0.1 percent.1 That may not sound like soaking the rich to your typical Bernie voter, but keep this in mind: The expiration of the Bush tax cuts for top earners, which required a fierce political showdown back in 2012, was only projected to bring in about $624 billion over a decade. Hillary's plan is far more ambitious by comparison.

Her proposal also channels the idea that the super-rich ought to be treated differently than the merely affluent. As of now, the very top income tax bracket starts with single filers who make $415,000 a year, which, as I've written at length, is absurd. Clnton would slap an additional 4 percent “tax surcharge” on all incomes above $5 million, while also imposing the ever-popular Buffett Rule, which forces millionaires to pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. She'd undo cuts to the estate tax, an underappreciated source of revenue that Republicans are determined to kill off, even though it only hits estates worth at least $5 million today. Clinton would apply it to estates worth more than $3 million. Less sexy to most liberals but more important from a revenue standpoint: She also wants to cap noncharitable deductions for families in higher tax brackets, which would make it much harder for them to reduce their obligations to the government.

This being a Clinton plan, there are lots of additional pieces in the puzzle—for instance, she would try to keep multinational corporations from using “earnings-stripping” to reduce their U.S. tax bills. She also has a wonky proposal to raise capital gains taxes by charging investors a higher or lower rate depending on how long they hold their stocks and bonds. It's supposedly intended to encourage more patience among shareholders and less short-term corporate thinking. It might not be well-designed for that purpose, but it would at least raise some revenue.