Steve Bannon's Plan Could be Devastating for Donald Trump

Steve Bannon has proposed "massive tax increases on billionaires" claiming none are part of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, despite the fact such a tax would impact Donald Trump.

Speaking on his podcast War Room, Trump's former chief strategist suggested most U.S. billionaires are "radical progressives" who should pay for the "mess" the country was in.

"Let's have massive tax increases on billionaires," he said. "The 499 of them are not MAGA, right, not MAGA at all. In fact the large proportion are radical progressives. They made this mess…why shouldn't they pay for it?"

The top rate of income tax in the U.S. is 37 percent, although this isn't payable on all income. In March, President Joe Biden's unveiled plans to propose a 25 percent minimum income tax on billionaires as part of a budget request to Congress, claiming billionaires only pay around 8 percent of their total income in taxes because income tax fails to take into account the rising value of their assets. At the time, Bannon spoke out in favor of the proposal.

However such tax increases would impact Bannon's former employer, Trump, whose net worth is $2.6 billion, according to a recent estimate by Forbes. He popularized the MAGA slogan during his successful 2016 presidential campaign and since then MAGA has been used to refer to his voter base.

The publication reported in October that the former president's wealth comes from a variety of sources including golf clubs and resorts ($870 million), New York City real estate ($690 million), cash and personal assets ($640 million) and other real estate ($190 million). It also reported he has $160 million from social media and brand businesses.

Newsweek has contacted representatives for Bannon and Trump by email for comment.

According to Forbes, there are 735 billionaires in the U.S., more than the 499 Banon estimated.

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, 188 of the world's 500 richest people are based in the United States and include the world's richest man Elon Musk, who has also been associated with the MAGA movement, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Trump is not on the list despite being a billionaire.

Bannon has in the past spoken out in favour of higher taxes on the rich. In 2021, after ProPublica published a report that found many of the country's most wealthy individuals paid little or no income tax in various years over the past decade, he said: "You've got to start increasing the marginal tax increases for the wealthy."

"This is absurd. This is a scam. You're being scammed, just like you were being scammed on free trade," Bannon told his listeners.

In 2017, Trump passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which largely benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these tax cuts will significantly reduce revenues and raise the deficit by $1 trillion to $2 trillion in the decade after their passage.

In October, the EU Tax Observatory said a global minimum tax on billionaires could raise $250 billion annually.