Seventy-one percent of voters, including a slim majority of Republicans, favor higher taxes on people who earn more than $1 million a year from capital gains, according to a Navigator Research survey released this week. 

Taxing the rich, in general, has long appealed to most voters. But Democrats are struggling to coalesce around several such tax hikes that President Joe Biden has proposed to pay for his “Build Back Better” agenda.  

African American children are suffering long-term disadvantages as a result of vast and growing disparities in the wealth of US families, with Black families with kids having access to barely 1 cent for every dollar enjoyed by their white counterparts.

I’ve long been accustomed to people outside the American west knowing next to nothing about my home state of Montana. Real things people have said to me over the years: is it part of Canada? Overrun with nothing but meth? A mythical place with big skies and nobody but macho cowfolk?

Of course, none of those statements are true. But in the last couple of years, Montana has become a destination among both the traveling and remote-work class – and my home is changing as fast as in any previous western land rush.

Nearly half of American workers do not earn enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment, according to new data.

Rents in the US continued to increase through the pandemic, and a worker now needs to earn about $20.40 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental. The median wage in the US is about $21 an hour.

Lebanon is days away from a “social explosion,” according to the country’s prime minister, amid what the World Bank has described as one of the worst economic depressions in modern history. The country’s currency has lost more than 90% of its value, unemployment has skyrocketed, and fuel prices have soared. Most homes and businesses, and even hospitals, only have power for a few hours each day, and pharmacies are running low on medicine. The U.N. has warned over three-quarters of households in Lebanon do not have enough food or money to buy food.

In the US, most people make their money from a regular job; they get a paycheck and pay income taxes. But the richest Americans, the top 1 percent, make most of their money from things like investments in real estate or the stock market. Those investments are taxed as capital gains. While federal income tax has a maximum tax rate of 37 percent, the tax rate for capital gains tops out at just 20 percent.

It’s why Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in America, has often said that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

The very richest Americans win at the tax game no matter which measure you use. ProPublica has published an article, based on a vast trove of never-before-seen IRS information, that reveals the pittance in taxes the ultrawealthy pay compared with their massive wealth accumulation.

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

The Joe Biden White House and Democrats in Congress are focused on increasing taxes on those with high incomes to help fund a sweeping legislative agenda. The majority of Americans, public opinion data show, favor the concept of higher taxes on the wealthy -- a fact of which the White House and Democrats in Congress are well aware. As White House Senior Adviser Anita Dunn wrote in a memo for her White House associates, "The President believes that we need to restore basic fairness to the tax code, and in the process generate revenues to invest in our competitiveness, children, and economy.