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To the Editor,
Among the cherished rules in many families is no politics during the holiday season at the table. In between the mashed potatoes and the gravy, I wanted to talk about a bit about the Mountain State
West Virginia children have the second highest rate of poverty in the nation. When all people have been included, Baby Dog's home state ranks third in the country for the number of folks below the poverty line. On Jan. 20, 2021, the day President Joe Biden took office in the United States at the end of Republican President Donald Trump's term in office: According to a Brookings Institute analysis from the previous year 2020, "13.9 million children lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity 5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many than did at the peak of the Great Recession in 2008 enough credit to go around.
The Republican West Virginia Legislature's 2022 tax cut included sparse relief for the bottom 20 percent of households by income, while the top 1 percent of households would get an average annual tax cut of nearly 500 times as much as the bottom 20 percent.
The Grand Old Party passed a still overwhelmingly benefits plan for the wealthy, with the top 20 percent of households receiving nearly two out of every three dollars in tax cuts. When Republican Gov. Jim Justice signed the new law, it left a dollar to split between the remaining 80 percent.
One of the root causes of wealth disparity is not so much earned income as accumulated wealth in the form of securities among the sly tricks the elite 1 percent used to continue their generation after generation of accumulating wealth paying while paying no taxes by stepping up on securities.
The method of stepping (step) up on securities is where Generation 1 buys a stock for a $1. The net worth when they pass is $10, and the $9 in capital gain tax is never paid unless it is sold. Then, if Generation 2 never sells the securities, no capital gains tax is paid -- even if they do sell, the $9 from Generation1 is never paid. When Generation 3 gets the stock, it is worth $25. The $9 will never be paid and the $15 from Generation 2 will never be paid, even if Generation 3 sells the stock and so forth into the next generation.
That is one of the main causes of the wealth gap -- it is not income as much as it is assets. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Saunders, I-Vt., among others, seek to return fairness by introducing a wealth tax on the elite 1 percent, taxing the fortunes of those with a wealth tax of 25 percent beyond $32.2 million dollars for roughly 164,000 families.
That would leave them still with more money than the other 99 percent will ever have.
Michael Traubert
Wellsburg