As Richest Pay Lowest Taxes In A Generation, Bachmann Would End Income Tax For 23,000 Millionaires

By Zaid Jilani

As ThinkProgress Economy editor Pat Garofalo noted last week, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michelle Bachmann (MN) has assembled a tax plan that would involve a massive corporate tax cut and tax increase on the working poor. Meanwhile, Bachmann would continue to cut taxes on the richest income-earners among us.

But Bachmann’s plan would do even worse things than simply continuing to hand out tax cuts for the rich and corporations. As Dan Baneman of the Tax Policy Centerfound, Bachmann’s proposal to repeal taxes on capital gains would actually remove 23,000 millionaires from the tax rolls altogether. Meanwhile, the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman estimates that “this largess would add about $25 billion to the deficit in one year.”

This is particularly shocking in light of the fact that the richest Americans are currently paying the some of the lowest effective tax rates in American history. As this chart from from Wealth for the Common Good shows, the top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era as working families have been asked to pay more and more:

Although it is impossible to surmise their exact intentions, it appears that Bachmann’s campaign is operating under the notion that the rich in America don’t have it good enough and that expanding the deficit is not a problem — as long as you’re continuing to cut taxes for the richest Americans.