How those years do fly by. We’ve now come nearly a quarter of the way through our 21st century. Who’s “winning” this century so far? An easy question to answer: the richest among us.
Those rich are riding high. In the Hamptons, the prime Long Island summer getaway for Wall Street’s finest, realtors are now expecting an “especially lively” spring sales season. In February, Bloomberg reports, new listings in the Hamptons soared 51 percent over their level a year ago. The leap in listings running between $5 million and $10 million: up 136 percent. Listings over $20 million tripled.
The biggest steal in the lot? Maybe a 5,261-square-foot manse in Southampton that sits on 2.4 acres, boasts a pool and a tennis court, and sits adjacent to a nature preserve. A mere $7 million!
Here in the United States as a whole, show stats from the World Inequality Database, our top 1 percent’s wealth has so far this century jumped over 20 percent — and these wealthy are paying markedly less of their incomes in taxes than they did at our current century’s start.
Credit these happy tax times for America’s most financially favored to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The first term of the second Bush to sit in the White House saw two major rich people-friendly tax cuts enacted — in 2001 and 2003 — and Donald Trump, in 2017, added another.
How much happiness have these cuts brought the wealthiest among us? Researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in a just-released statistical deep dive into our new century’s first quarter, tell that story quite well.
The Bush tax cuts didn’t fully phase in until 2010. In that year, an earlier CBPP report had noted, the Bush cuts raised the after-tax incomes of America’s richest 1 percent by 6.7 percent. In that same year, the Bush tax cuts inched up the after-tax incomes of the nation’s poorest 20 percent by just 1 percent.
The Trump tax cut in 2017 simply magnified that reward-the-rich trend. Top 1-percenters now stand to gain, on average, an estimated $61,090 in 2025 from the Trump tax giveaway. Our richest one-tenth of 1 percent, meanwhile, will be pocketing an average tax-time gain of $252,300, over 3,600 times the $70 gain that taxpayers in America’s poorest 20 percent will realize.
Source: inequality.org
