Elizabeth Warren: Let’s Tax Millionaires To Allow Students To Refinance Their Debt

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) laid out a new plan that would tax millionaires and use that revenue to help students refinance their student loans.

Delivering the keynote address at the Higher Ed Not Debt Campaign launch event on Thursday at the Center For American Progress, Warren argued that America faces a choice: “Do we invest in students, or millionaires?” Warren plans to introduce a bill that would create an “America that invests in those who get an education” by revising the tax code and enacting the Buffet rule. Watch it:

NDP wealth tax a ‘bad move,’ Don Drummond says

The NDP wealth tax in the provincial budget was a “bad move” and will struggle to reap even half the $470 million a year the minority Liberal government expects, says economist Don Drummond.

Ontario will be fortunate to collect between “$200 million and $300 million, tops,” the former TD Bank executive and author of a report on Ontario’s financial situation said Friday in his first public comments on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s fiscal blueprint.

Buffett Rule Vote: Tax Measure Fails In Senate

WASHINGTON -- Democrats' attempt to pass a Buffett Rule tax on the super wealthy failed Monday in the Senate, as Republicans blocked the measure in a sharply partisan debate.

Democrats cast it as a bid for fairness that would end the circumstance in which billionaires like Warren Buffett pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than their secretaries.

Republicans cast it as a political gimmick and an attempt by President Barack Obama to give more Americans a "free ride."

It was blocked 51-45 in a filibuster vote. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas were the only politicians to cross party lines.

"The wealthiest one percent takes home the highest share of the nation's income since the early '20s, the roaring '20s," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. "Times are tough for many middle class American families. Millionaires and billionaires aren't sharing the pain or the sacrifice, not one bit. Last year there were 7,000 millionaires who didn't pay a single penny in federal income taxes."

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) countered that statistics show the rich are paying plenty, and that it's the bottom half of the income ladder that is doing too little.

François Hollande vows to tax the rich to pay off French deficit

François Hollande, the leftwing frontrunner in the French presidential race, has vowed to make the rich pay the highest price to help drag France out of its economic crisis, while promising to pump more money into schools and state-assisted jobs.

The Socialist rural MP, who recently declared "my real adversary in this campaign is the world of finance", launched his manifesto on Thursday, a road map of how the left would deal with the financial crisis. Hollande said he would raise taxes for banks and big companies as well as France's richest people, and use the money to help wipe out the nation's crippling public deficit.

By scrapping some €29bn (£24bn) worth of tax breaks for wealthier people introduced under Nicolas Sarkozy, he said he could find €20bn to deal with the corrosion of French society: record unemployment, soaring youth jobless figures and an education system that has been shamed as one of the most unequal in Europe, where one in six children leave with no qualifications.

Hollande increased his lead in the polls after his first big rally on Sunday used Barack Obama-inspired slogans of "hope and "change". But he was under pressure to counter the charges by Sarkozy that the French left is high-spending, with its head in the clouds of idealism and little credibility on managing the world's financial crisis.

Millionaire Tax: White House Talking Points Go After Republicans

WASHINGTON -- In certain corners of the progressive political universe, there has been ongoing frustration with the Obama White House for attacking the institution of Congress as a whole rather than its Republican parts.

The angst surfaced briefly, and most recently, during the introduction of the administration's jobs bill, when President Barack Obama stood before Congress demanding action without pinpointing the party most likely to hold it up. Since then, however, the president has drawn sharper lines when castigating the legislative branch, noting specifically that many of the job creation ideas he's adopted once had Republican support. In the White House's talking points on its latest legislative proposal -- a new tax on income over $1 million -- there's another sharp elbow thrown the GOP's way.

"Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans believe the burden of deficit reduction should only come from spending cuts to critical programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and refuse to ask millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share to get our fiscal house in order and reduce the deficit," the bullet point reads.