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This is a chart of the wealth of every single American household.
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That includes cars, houses, yachts, jewelry — and even cold, hard cash.
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It also includes things we owe other people, like student loans.
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So let's take a quick tour of American household wealth.
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We can start over here, where we see people who owe way more than they have.
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As we move further right, we can see — oh, that's me.
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And there's my doctor, who owns an expensive home.
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And there's former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson!
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But when we get to the very richest people in the world — oh hey, it's Beyoncé — we can zoom out so far that this chart looks like a stick and we still can't see the top of their wealth.
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Because these people are so much wealthier than the rest of us.
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In other words, this chart doesn't just show wealth.
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It shows the staggering wealth inequality we have in America.
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But recently, politicians have been talking about an idea that's never been done before in America.
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To even out wealth, we should tax it.
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In January, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed something called a "wealth tax."
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This was a big deal.
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Because this doesn't typically get taxed.
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Most of the taxes we pay only happen when money changes hands — like when we earn money or spend money.
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But according to Warren, here's the problem with that.
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This bar represents my wealth.
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And this is my friend's wealth.
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I think he owns a yacht.
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But because both of us have the same job and earn the same amount of money, our income gets taxed about the same.
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"Two people who may have the same income, but are in wildly different economic circumstances."
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So to fix it, Warren wants to tax the actual wealth people have, but only for the very, very rich.
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Here's her proposal: All the wealth above this line — 50 million dollars — would be taxed at 2 percent each year.
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All the wealth above this line — 1 billion dollars — would be taxed at 3 percent.
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So if you have 40 million dollars, you'd pay nothing.
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If you have 60 million dollars, you'd pay nothing on your first 50 million, but 2% on the 10 million after that, or $200 thousand.
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And if you have 2 billion dollars, you'd pay about $49 million.
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So what would happen if we imposed Senator Warren's tax?
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Only the richest 0.05 percent of Americans would pay this tax.
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But in 2016, the government could have raised about 200 billion dollars from it.
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That could pay for a plan that makes public college tuition free — three times over.
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It could pay for all federal food assistance programs, like food stamps, two times over.
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It could get close to cutting child poverty by 60 percent.
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These are massive programs that would help millions of people.
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And what makes that possible is the huge amount of wealth stuck here, at the very, very top with the ultra-rich.
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A wealth tax hones in on that.
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