Ron takes on one of tax code's "most outrageous loopholes"

In the face of troubling new statistics showing America’s widening economic inequality gap, Ron met in Oregon with Main Street Alliance members who support his proposal that would equalize the tax treatment of wages and wealth by requiring millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. 

After his meeting last week with alliance members at the Shwop clothing swap boutique in southeast Portland, Ron held a news conference to share his proposal’s strengths for both employees of Main Street Alliance small businesses like Shwop and the middle-class customers who patronize them.

 “We have two tax codes in America, one for the people who shop and work here where taxes are taken out once or twice a month right out of their paycheck, based on their wage,” said Ron, the Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee.

“Then there is the tax system for the folks at the top of the economic pyramid who can to a great extent defer and defer paying taxes to the point where they don’t pay for years, if at all,” he said. “That’s not right.”

Calling tax deferral one of the “least-known but most outrageous loopholes in the tax code,’ he said his proposal would unlock an estimated $3.8 trillion in unrealized gains by treating that wealth for the top 0.3 percent of taxpayers the same as wages for everybody else in the tax code.

The additional revenue unlocked by his proposal would be used to ensure Social Security could keep paying full benefits instead of instituting a 20 percent cut in 2034.

"A lot of that (tax collection) can come into small communities for investments like housing, health care, education and child care," he said. "So it has the benefit of reducing inequality and giving everybody the opportunity of getting ahead."