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What’s different about Biden’s plan to tax billionaires · Apple News Today

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  Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, March 28th. I'm Duarte Geraldino.
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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: And I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Geraldino: President Biden is planning to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in his new budget proposal today. "The Washington Post" looks at the plan that the White House is calling the "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax."
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  Basu: The plan would place a 20% minimum tax rate on U.S. households worth more than $100 million. The Biden administration says most of the tax revenue would come from around 700 American billionaires.
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  Geraldino: This proposal would tax both income and unrealized capital gains. The last part of that is key. The super wealthy often pay lower rates of taxes than people with average wealth. A previous White House estimate said some of the richest families paid an average federal tax rate of 8.2% of their income. Average rates can be this low because the wealth of billionaires is often in investments. In the U.S., many investments are taxed when they're sold.
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  Basu: And those are realized capital gains. What's different about Biden's plan is that it would tax some investments before they are sold, for certain very wealthy people, to make sure they pay a minimum 20% tax rate.
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  Geraldino: If that happens, the billionaires tax could raise an estimated $360 billion in new revenue over the next decade. The plan is similar to a proposal from the Senate Democrats last year, as a way to offset the cost of Biden's Build Back Better plan.
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  Basu: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pushing Western leaders to send more weapons and ramp up sanctions on Russia. Over the weekend, in a video address, he praised Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol for defending the southern port city and he questioned the courage of some ally countries.
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  Geraldino: Zelenskyy has gained a reputation for knowing how to harness the power of his on-screen image. But, as we've mentioned before, he got his start on the small screen. His old sitcom, "Servant of the People," is now on Netflix. Cultural critic Ani Bundel wrote about it for "NBC." And she says it's really strange watching Zelenskyy play a fictionalized president.
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  Ani Bundel: This is a life-or-death situation, and it's surreal watching it presented as a comedy when you know that the reality is that it's a tragedy that's going on.
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  In the show, Zelenskyy plays a history teacher whose viral rant on corruption launches him to the presidency. Bundel points out, even though it wasn't that long ago, politics was an entirely different game when the show first premiered.
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  Bundel: This is in 2015, you know, pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, pre-COVID. You know, this whole idea of, you know, a simple, goodhearted history teacher going viral and, you know, basically toppling power structures, it's still satirical. It's still something that we think of as, it could be a good thing. Nowadays, watching it back, it feels almost, I don't know, like quaint.
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  Basu: Bundel says watching the series is a reminder that Zelenskyy got his start as an actor and a comedian and that he's really good at his craft. And it turns out, some of those skills definitely transfer to his style of leadership today.
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  Bundel: I don't know if you watch those little Instagram videos that he puts up. He always finds his light. He knows improv really well. He knows short, quick sentences that are to the point. It's really impressive what a great leader they accidentally got through a comedy show. And that, to me, may be the most surreal part about this of all.
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  A lot of mass shootings in the United States are carried out by people armed with semi-automatic weapons. It's not against the law to buy them. There are laws against fully automatic weapons, which can empty an entire magazine with a single pull of the trigger. But increasingly, people are finding ways to convert their semi-automatic guns into fully automatic ones. As reporter Alain Stephens from "The Trace" explains, that requires a special tool.
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  Alain Stephens: To do that comes the auto sear, which is an automatic conversion device that you can drop into, you know, an AR-15, or you can attach to the back of a Glock handgun. And it essentially turns that into a fully automatic weapon.
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  Geraldino: Auto sears are hard to get, legally, in the United States. People need an extensive federal background check just to buy one. But Stephens explains, in recent years, these conversion devices have become really popular on the criminal market. Some are available for as little as $20.
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  Stephens: And for people who want to try to get, you know, a machine gun outside the purview of the law, they're very cheap and they're pretty easy to install if you know what you're doing. And so, they've really taken off in the last, you know, five years or so.
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  Basu: Stephens' reporting found these conversion devices are particularly sought after by anti-government extremists.
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  Stephens: And we actually saw that in the case of Steven Carrillo. He was an Air Force sergeant and a member of the Boogaloo Boys, an anti-government extremist group who ended up using one of these weapons. He ended up launching an ambush on two federal security officers, killing one in the attack. And then the following month, he would use the weapon again to go out and kill another law enforcement officer.
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  Geraldino: The investigation by "The Trace" and "VICE News" found that federal prosecutions which involve automatic conversion devices are rising fast. In the past few years, federal agencies launched initiatives to track production and delivery, especially from overseas. One federal agent said that in his first ten years on the job, he rarely came across machine guns. Now, he sees these types of converted weapons all the time.
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  Stephens: We've seen them in robberies. We've seen them in just arms trafficking, right. We see them in drug traffickers. And also, we just see them in videos on the street, you know, in certain communities where violence is quite normal. These things are kind of becoming more commonplace.
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  This year's Oscars included groundbreaking wins and a surprise moment that you may have already seen on social media if you didn't stay up to watch it. Will Smith walked on the stage and smacked Chris Rock. And he wasn't kidding. The comedian had just made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's baldness. She has a medical condition. Later in the night, when Smith returned to collect the Best Actor trophy, he referenced what had happened earlier, saying, "I'm hoping the Academy invites me back."
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  Basu: That was Will Smith's first-ever Oscar. Jessica Chastain also was a first-time winner as Best Actress. It was a night of a lot of firsts. Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer person of color to win an acting Oscar with her supporting role. Jane Campion took home the directing award. She's the first woman to have been nominated twice in that category. And Best Picture went to "CODA," a historic win because the core cast members were mostly deaf actors performing in sign language. Troy Kotsur won for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar. "CODA" also stood out as the first film from a streaming service, in this case Apple TV+, to win Best Picture.
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  Geraldino: Our colleagues have pulled together the best Oscars coverage, from the winning moments to the red carpet looks. That's on the Apple News app, along with all the stories we talked about today.
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  Basu: You'll also find full coverage of March Madness, as college basketball gets closer to crowning its champions.
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  Geraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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