As we look forward to the 2020 elections, Shondaland will be covering the candidates and the issues that are important to the American people. Be sure to check back for our continued coverage.
My life has had a lot of twists and turns. When I was 12, my daddy suffered a heart attack and was out of work. We lost the family station wagon, and almost lost our home, but then my mom got a minimum wage job answering phones at Sears. That job saved our home, and it saved our family. Then, at 19, I married my high school sweetheart and dropped out of college. I got my second chance at the University of Houston where tuition cost just $50 a semester, and got my dream job teaching children with special needs at a public elementary school. When my daughter Amelia turned two, I decided to enroll in a public law school that cost $450 a semester.
Because America invested in kids like me, I got the chance to become a teacher, a law school professor, a U.S. Senator, and eventually, a candidate for President of the United States. But today it’s virtually impossible for a young person to find that kind of opportunity.
I’ve spent my career getting down to the bottom of one question: why?
I wanted to find out why the path to economic security is rocky for working families and why the path is even steeper and rockier for families of color. What I found is that over time America's middle class has been deliberately hollowed out by the rich and powerful — people who rigged the system to work in their favor, while hanging the rest of us out to dry. The result is an extreme concentration of wealth with the richest 130,000 families in America holding nearly as much wealth as the bottom 117 million families combined.
In our country, success is a collective achievement. For any one person who makes it, hundreds of people (some not even earning a living wage) have to chip in time, effort, and energy to help make that success possible. No one makes it that far on their own. Even what seems like the simple act of getting goods from one place to another requires trucks driven by working people, on roads that we all pay for, protected by police and firefighters we all chip in for.
As Americans, we’re glad you made it big. But all we ask is that once you make it to the very top, you pay up a few of your pennies so every kid can make it too. That’s why we need a wealth tax — and I’ve got a plan for that.
My plan is simple: after your first fifty million in wealth, you chip in two cents on the dollar. That’s it, just two cents. And once you hit over a billion dollars in wealth, you pay six cents on the dollar. Just charging two cents for people earning more than fifty million (and a few pennies more for the billionaires) — who account for roughly 75,000 households across America — could generate more than three trillion dollars in revenue.
Here’s what we’ll do with that revenue: We can have universal childcare and high-quality early education for every baby, ages 0-5, and raise wages for child care workers and early education teachers. We can cancel student loan debt for 42 million Americans and give our economy a huge boost. The day I sign this debt cancellation bill into law, the black-white wealth gap among people with student loans would close by 25 percent.
We can invest $800 billion to make every K-12 school a great public school, and provide public two-year and four-year college for free. We can invest a minimum of $50 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions. HBCUs have done an incredible job supporting our communities, and do so with little help. We have failed HBCUs for far too long and it’s time to give them the resources they are entitled to. And we can slash health care costs for families with a down payment on Medicare for All.
Yes, there are some billionaires out there who won’t support my wealth tax — in fact, I’ve been known to make at least one cry at the idea that under a Warren presidency, they’ll have to pay their fair share.
But here’s the bottom line: I’m in this fight because our country has been working great for the rich and powerful, and not much for everyone else. The challenges we face are enormous and we can’t take them on by taking shortcuts or nibbling around the edges. Reversing decades of corruption and inequality requires that we take bold action, and I am not afraid to stand up to power, build a grassroots movement of people all across this country, and get it done.
Elizabeth Warren is a former law professor, senator from Massachusetts, and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. She previously served as an assistant to former President Barack Obama and special adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury, and was instrumental in establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before being elected to the Senate in 2012. Follow her on Twitter @EWarren.
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