Billionaire Bill Gates thinks that rich Americans like him need to pay more taxes.
“The rich should pay more than they currently do, and that includes Melinda and me,” Gates said in a blog post on New Year’s Eve. “We’ve updated our tax system before to keep up with changing times, and we need to do it again, starting with raising taxes on people like me.”
In the post, Gates laid out his justification for a revamped American tax code that would increase the amount the wealthiest Americans pay each year. The founder of Microsoft lamented the federal government generating less revenue than it spends. He advocated for increasing taxes at the local and state level to make the American economy more equitable for poorer citizens.
[Read: Bill Gates tops Jeff Bezos as richest person in the world]
“When I say the government needs to raise more money, some people ask why Melinda and I don’t voluntarily pay more in taxes than the law requires,” he said. “The answer is that simply leaving it up to people to give more than the government asks for is not a scalable solution. People pay taxes as an obligation of law and citizenship, not out of charity. Additional voluntary giving will never raise enough money for everything the government needs to do.”
Gates, who is worth more than $100 billion, claimed that if he and his wife “signed over our foundation’s entire endowment to the state of California, it wouldn’t be enough to fund their public schools for even one year.”
Several Democratic presidential primary candidates have advocated for a hefty wealth tax.
“It’s great that Americans are debating who should pay more in taxes and how,” Gates wrote. “I believe we can make our system fairer without sacrificing the incentive to innovate.”
