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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Survey: Taxing Billionaires Popular Across Political Parties

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Friday, December 3, 2021   

AUSTIN, Texas -- Nearly seven in ten Americans say billionaires are not paying their fair share in taxes, according to a new survey.

Among likely voters, 65% say they support taxing the stock-market gains of the ultrarich.

Morris Pearl, board chair of the group Patriotic Millionaires, said raising taxes on the nation's wealthiest residents would be an important first step in reducing decades of growing economic inequality.

"The vast majority of Americans support having rich people, who pay almost no taxes, pay the same tax rates as people who work for a living," Pearl reported. "Have money deducted from your paychecks every single week for taxes."

The Data for Progress survey showed strong support for raising taxes on the rich across party lines. But congressional Republicans have consistently rejected tax increases on the wealthy. And moderate Democrats recently defeated a proposal to fund President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan by taxing some 700 billionaires, calling it an attack on the nation's biggest philanthropists and job creators.

A recent ProPublica report exposed how many of the richest Americans pay no federal taxes through a variety of loopholes, all legal.

Pearl noted making the nation a place where everyone has an opportunity to succeed is a lot harder than raising money to put someone's name on a new concert hall.

"But we also need a lot of other things," Pearl asserted. "We need sewage-treatment centers. We need schools in parts of the country where people who work for a living actually live and want to send their kids to good schools. We need hospitals. We need a lot of things that philanthropy doesn't pay for."

Pearl pointed to the nation's opioid epidemic as one devastating example of what can happen when people face a rigged system every day and lose hope. He contended too many Texans who pay taxes cannot get ahead, and they worry their children won't fare any better.

"It's because of the gross inequality that our civil society is falling apart," Pearl contended. "We need to change what's making our inequality get worse and worse and worse, before everyone just gives up on America."


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