To the editor:

Politics in this country has reached the point where I would be shocked if any candidate for the U.S. House or Senate showed the courage to support a national wealth tax of 25 percent on all individuals worth $10 million or more. Here’s what we could do with that revenue:

1. Eliminate the federal budget deficit and the national debt.

2. Pass a Canadian-style national health insurance program to cover all Americans.

3. Turn student loans into scholarships.

4. Make Social Security fully solvent beyond the current date of 2034.

5. Supplement the unequal pay for equal work that women do in this country to bring it up to what men get paid.

6. Help working families pay day-care expenses for their children and elderly family members.

7. Guarantee jobs to all Americans that will pay enough to lift them above the official poverty line and the official “near poverty” line.

And there would still be money left over!

This is how much wealth that there is in this country. Eighty percent of all of the wealth in the USA was never earned by those who hold it — it was inherited. It grows and grows into tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and into the billions.

No one could possibly ever need that much money. Yet I can’t find one Democrat in either house of Congress who supports a national wealth tax.

Someone should write a book and call it “Profiles In Cowardice.”

They’re supposed to care about helping the people more than they care about raising millions of dollars so that they can win re-election.

By the way, before he adopted his current “incarnation” as a FAKE conservative Republican, Donald Trump, back in 1999, proposed a 14.25 percent percent new national wealth tax on all individuals with a net worth of $10 million and higher. He wanted to use just some of the money generated from it to totally eliminate the national debt and to add to the solvency of Social Security for many, many years. I have to give him credit for proposing a national wealth tax before I did.

Sincerely,

Stewart B. Epstein

Rochester