Back in 1933, the journalist-turned-lawyer Wesley Lloyd turned into a new member of Congress from Washington State. Two months into his first term, Lloyd rose to address his fellow lawmakers. They had all, he related, so far applied little more than “palliatives” to the continuing Great Depression.
“We have subsidized the farmer and charged the cost to labor,” Lloyd observed, “and we are attempting to subsidize labor and propose to let the farmer pay the bill.”
What Congress needed to do instead: “lay the ax of legislative enactment at the tap root” of what had gone wrong in America and “place a definite limitation on the acquisition and ownership of wealth.”
“A startlingly small number of our people,” Lloyd charged, had come to enjoy a “vastly major proportion of our national wealth.” His answer: a constitutional amendment giving Congress the power “to limit the wealth” of individual Americans to no more than $1 million, the equivalent of about $23 million today.
“I propose in the main,” said Lloyd, “to bring up the poor and bring down the rich into the class of the average man, where all may find real happiness and where we may know a widespread national prosperity.”
Over the next dozen years, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the United States would make historically unprecedented progress toward that greater equality Lloyd so deeply desired. By 1945, America’s richest faced a 94 percent tax rate on income over $200,000. Lloyd, sadly, wouldn’t be around to see that progress. He died early in 1936, midway through his second term.
But Lloyd’s tax-the-rich spirit lives on, especially today in his home Washington State. Earlier this year, 19 of the state’s senators and 43 state reps introduced legislation that would fix a first-ever 1 percent annual tax on stocks, bonds, and other forms of “intangible personal property” worth over $250 million. The Evergreen State currently hosts over 700 grand fortunes that top this quarter-billion mark.
The holders of these massive accumulations have — for now at least — dodged this proposed annual 1 percent tax on their “financial intangible property.” The proposal failed to get through the 2023 state legislative session. But that failure hasn’t left Washington’s deepest pockets feeling like celebrating. The reason? They’ve just become subject to another new tax, a measure that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat is describing as the state’s first-ever “wealth-related levy.”
This particular levy, a 7-percent excise tax on asset-sale profits over $250,000, actually became law two years ago, then got shelved when a county court ruled the new tax unconstitutional. This past March, a state Supreme Court ruling reversedthat county ruling, and wealthy Washingtonians are now paying up on their new taxes due — at much higher levels than the state’s legislative number-crunchers had anticipated!
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
