The United States has already borrowed $27 trillion. In addition, the US has also promised to pay out $155 trillion to people, also known as unfunded liability. The Democrats, if handed the reins of power, want to spend even more: free college, free healthcare, free rent.
Where will all of this come from? The government takes in $3.3 trillion a year in taxes from all sources.
If we confiscated the entire fortune of the top 25 richest Americans, the Government would have $1.4 trillion. If applied to the US debt, we could bring the debt back to where it was on May 28, 2020, or 142 days ago. Now what?
There are only 800 US billionaires. If we confiscate the additional $2 trillion in their net worth, we could cut the debt back to where it was April 1, 2020.
There are 71,000 people with a net worth of $50 million or more. There are 1.3 million people in the US with a net worth of $10 million or more. There are 7.6 million people with a net worth of $2 million or more. There are only 18.6 million people in the US with a net worth of over $1 million.
So when they tell you that the top 1% of the richest own blah, blah, blah- remember that the top 1% of Americans includes people worth about $3 million or more. That doesn’t make them the uber rich jetset. Most of the richest 1% are people like lawyers, doctors, real estate workers, and stock brokers.
The article that I found many of these stats on says that 76% of US millionaires is Caucasian, as if it indicated some kind of nefarious, systemic racism. If you think that, you are not good at math. You see, 75% of the US population is Caucasian, making a US millionaire as likely to be one race as another, when adjusted per capita. (There goes the systemic racism trope.)
If you confiscate all of the wealth of the top 1%, you would pay the national debt down to where it was about a year ago. To do so would require cutting the heart out of the US economy. There would be no more doctors, no more investment professionals, no more business owners. Then what? We don’t have a problem with unfair distribution in this country. We have a problem with out of control spending.
3 Comments
Therefore · October 18, 2020 at 6:19 am
This reminds me of the story of an old farming family. The richest family in the valley. When the father died unexpectedly it turned out they all that wealth was in the land and buildings.
Millions of dollars in value and no cash to pay the tax bill.
They ended up selling a chunk of land for housing in order to raise enough money to keep the farm.
Lady I heard the entire farm is now over loaded with houses.
Just because you are "wealthy"it doesn't mean you don't have problems paying your bills every month…
SiGraybeard · October 18, 2020 at 3:30 pm
Your math is all good, but you don't make the big point that we can't confiscate all the wealth of the billionaires and multimillionaires because they essentially don't have that wealth. It's in their holdings in various markets, like real estate, stocks or other assets.
In Seattle they're trying to come up with special taxes just to penalize Jeff Bezos. His worth is tied up in stock shares and physical assets of Amazon and his other companies. If he had to sell all his stock to pay taxes or for this confiscation, it would crash the stock and they'd net pennies on each dollar they expect. I'm sure the same goes for virtually all of them.
Divemedic · October 18, 2020 at 9:04 pm
I didn't even want to go there, because even if the wealth COULD be confiscated at full value, it just isn't enough. My wife and I have a net worth of just over $1.4 million, but nearly half of that is in real estate and most of the rest is invested in stocks and various government bonds. I don't have a giant vault filled with gold coins that I swim in, like Scrooge McDuck.
So the government confiscates my bonds by refusing to repay them. That is called repudiating debt. So now the government doesn't have to repay the bond, but have just made all of the remaining national debt (in the form of other bonds) worthless. Now they haven't paid the debt, and have also made it a certainty that no one else will ever buy government bonds again. So now what?
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