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Bernie Sanders believes the US government should confiscates every penny a person makes after USD $999 million (AUD $1.4 billion).
The Vermont Senator proposed the bold idea during an interview with journalist Chris Wallace on HBO Max.
Wallace asked him about the concept while referencing his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, where he states that billionaires should not exist.
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“Sir, you’re saying that billionaires should not exist,” the host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? asked.
“So are you basically saying that once you get to $999 million, that the government should confiscate all the rest?”
Sanders replied: “I’m saying that we should go back to a very progressive tax policy like what we had under Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
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Wallace pressed Sanders to declare whether that would mean additional coin would go towards the government.
“You may disagree with me, fine. Yeah, I think people can make it on $999 million,” the US senator responded.
In his book, the two-time presidential candidate points out how 90 per cent of America’s wealth is owned by one-tenth of 1 per cent of the population.
“Do we believe in the Golden Rule? [or] do we accept … that gold rules – and that lying, cheating, and stealing are OK if you’re powerful enough to get away with it?” he writes.
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The Senator adds that we should be putting our own oligarchs under the same scrutiny as we do Vladimir Putin to enforce true 'democracy'.
“There is little public discussion about the power of corporate America and how oligarchs wield that power to benefit their interests at the expense of working families,” he adds.
In 2020, Sanders notably introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Act, which would have imposed a 60 per cent tax on all the wealth accumulated by 467 billionaires - the richest 0.001 per cent of America - between 18 March 2020 and January 2021.
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He proposed the bill when 5.4 million Americans lost their health insurance and 50 million applied for unemployment insurance during the pandemic.
He said that the funds of the emergency tax would fund the healthcare expenses of those uninsured and underinsured for one whole year.
“We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer,” he said in a statement.
"Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans."