Yahoo Finance

President Donald Trump is taking aim at taxing some of America's wealthiest individuals and married couples. Yahoo! Finance's Rick Newman here with more details. Rick, we were just talking about what could end up being in this big, beautiful bill, as the president likes to call it. Um, and there's a lot of stuff on the table. So, this is one of the things that has been floated.

Well, Trump himself has sort of um, had had tepid support for what you might call a millionaires' tax, but it's not much of one. His idea is you go all the way up to $2.5 million in annual income for individuals. It'll be $5 million for married people, uh, and then you would, instead of paying the 37% tax on that, you would go back to the old top tax bracket of 39.6%. Um, so he has kind of suggested that maybe Congress put that in their tax bill, but it would only generate about $2 billion of revenue per year, which is nothing. I mean, my calculator doesn't even have enough decimal points to figure out what percentage of federal spending is that. It's it's puny. However, if you lower the income threshold uh, to $1 million, or you just went back to where it was before uh, before Trump cut the top rate in 2017, you'd actually get more money. You could get as much as $200 billion per year. That that's actually real money. Um, and they they need money. So, Congress is giving themselves permission to add $4 trillion to the national debt with this tax bill, but they've got somewhere between $6 trillion and $9 trillion worth of tax cuts and other stuff they want to do. So, they're trying to find ways to come up with new revenue, or or cut spending, and it's and they're getting to the point where it's going to be very tough. I mean, they're they're no there's no easy way to do this, and every every spending cut or tax hike hurts somebody. So, when you when you when we're going to have to do this, it is going to be wealthy Americans who are going to get the tax hike first uh, before anybody else. So, why not now?