Taking All the Money from the Rich Would Pay For Three Months of US Government

Class warfare will not balance the budget

1. The rich already pay a disproportionate share of the total tax burden – The video explains that the top-20 percent of income earners pay more than 67 percent of all federal taxes even though they earn only about 50 percent of total income. And, as I've explained, it would be very difficult to squeeze that much more money from them.

2. There aren't enough rich people to fund big government – The video explains that stealing every penny from every millionaire would run the federal government for only three months. And it also makes the very wise observation that this would be a one-time bit of pillaging since rich people would quickly learn not to earn and report so much income. We learned in the 1980s that the best way to soak the rich is by putting a stop to confiscatory tax rates.

Comments

[Scarecrow Repair]

It would be a ZERO-time pillaging, because most of their wealth is not piles of cash, but stocks, bonds, and other investments that someone would have to buy ... and all the people who could have bought it are suddenly flat broke.

[The Derider]

It's conflating a 100% income tax rate on the rich with seizing their existing assets.

Doing the latter would fund the government a lot longer than 3 months.

[Brutus]

Once. Or maybe not even once, as the assets they own would soon fall into the hands of bureaucrats who would run them into the ground in short order.

The Left hasn't succeeded in killing the goose that laid the golden egg, but they are chasing it around the barnyard with an axe.

[Scarecrow Repair]

Right you are, I did confuse the two. But I saw a similar analysis several months ago, which is my excuse. This analysis said confiscating all the wealth of the Fortune 100 or 500 or some such wouldn't fund even one year of deficit.

Can't remember now where I saw it.