Boosting taxes on America’s wealthiest people could bring in trillions of dollars to help the country solve its most pressing problems, according to Gabriela Sandoval, executive director of the non-profit Bay Area think tank Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute.
Sandoval, a former sociology professor at University of California-Santa Cruz, was hired in January at the San Francisco-based think tank founded last year and named after a concept coined by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. She previously worked at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland and became steeped in issues around wealth inequality. “No one wanted to talk about decreasing wealth at the higher end,” says Sandoval.
The think tank promotes adding special surtaxes for ultra-wealthy people, imposing a “wealth tax” on assets such as real estate, yachts and luxury vehicles, and increasing IRS enforcement on the super-rich.
