U.S. lawmakers should close loopholes, raise the estate tax and hike the capital-gains tax so that it equals the rate on labour income, Gates wrote Monday in a year-end blog post. He also called for states and local governments to make their taxes "fairer" and reiterated his support for a state income tax in Washington, where he and his wife Melinda live.
"I've been disproportionately rewarded for the work I've done — while many others who work just as hard struggle to get by," he wrote. "That's why I'm for a tax system in which, if you have more money, you pay a higher percentage in taxes. And I think the rich should pay more than they currently do, and that includes Melinda and me."
"But I believe we can make our system fairer without sacrificing the incentive to innovate," he wrote. "Americans in the top 1 per cent can afford to pay a lot more before they stop going to work or creating jobs. In the 1970s, when Paul Allen and I were starting Microsoft, marginal tax rates were almost twice the top rate today. It didn't hurt our incentive to build a great company."
Some people ask Gates why he doesn't just pay extra taxes himself, but that "is not a scalable solution," he wrote. "Additional voluntary giving will never raise enough money for everything the government needs to do."
The Gates foundation had paid out US$50.1 billion in grants as of the end of 2018. Gates defended tax breaks for foundations in his post, writing that "philanthropy is good at managing high-risk projects that government can't take on and corporations won't."
Just ran across this. The last bit is interesting because some people keep clamoring that Billionaires should just give all their money away. I don't agree with that since there needs to be a regular stream of revenue for fiscal responsibility not a huge influx at once since most people in gov't are way too corrupt or stupid to handle it properly.