The real winners of the 2024 election are America’s billionaires. That’s according to a new analysis from Americans for Tax Fairness, which lays out the Republican plan to continue the transfer of wealth from working people to America’s wealthy.
The report states that America’s 815 billionaires now hold a record high of $6.7 trillion of our national wealth. According to the report:
“Just between the day before Election Day (Monday, November 4) to a week after the voting deadline (Tuesday, November 12), billionaire wealth jumped $276 billion, with 20% of the gains going to Elon Musk, who alone saw his personal wealth grow by an astounding $57 billion in a week. Now Republicans have promised to protect and expand those riches through more tax cuts.”
Republicans openly say they plan to decrease taxes for the wealthy by making cuts to social programs like food stamps and Medicaid.
The Republicans are also hoping to eliminate the estate tax, one of the only ways the federal government’s can reign in dynastic wealth of America’s wealthiest families. The new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate has Sen. John Thune the chamber’s main champion of estate-tax repeal. By one estimate, the elimination of the estate tax would save billionaire families around $2.7 trillion and deplete the exact same amount of funding for vital public services like Medicare, child care, education and housing. These are all programs that America’s working class depends on.
“Abolishing the estate tax would only benefit the 1-in-500 ultra-rich families who pay it: this year, a couple must be worth over $27 million to owe even a penny, and that number goes up annually with inflation. Yet getting rid of the estate tax would hurt everyone who won’t inherit a fortune by reducing federal revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars and thereby threatening funding for important public services and adding more to the public debt.”
You can read the report in full here.