BILLIONAIRES HAVE A TAX RATE AS LOW AS ONE PERCENT

“In December of 2011, in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas,
after President [Obama] had given up on the budget deal and was starting
to focus on his reelection message, he talked about income inequality, referring
to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era agenda, known as the
New Nationalism. ‘Roosevelt was called a radical,’ Obama said. “He was called
a socialist, even a communist.’ Obama attacked the ‘big banks’ and the ‘billionaires’
who have a tax rate as low as one percent. In his 2012 campaign against Mitt

Romney, he continued to strike those populist notes.

“But it was never a good fit. Felicia Wong, the president and C.E.O.
of the Roosevelt Institute, a leading progressive think tank, noted that

Several of [President] Obama’s economic advisers – including Jason Furman,
now the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, the
director of the Office of Management and Budget - have shifted to concentrate
more on issues of inequality. ‘Obama was in some ways a traditionalist about
some of this stuff,’ Wong said. "But just look at how that frame has changed on
the Democratic side."

Ryan Lizza, “The Great Divide, Clinton, Sanders and the Future
of the Democratic Party,” New Yorker, March 21, 2016, pp: 38-44 (39).