Here's What Would Happen If We Seized All the Wealth From America's 800 Billionaires

Budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion—and speeding towards $4 trillion within a decade—will force increasingly difficult budgetary trade-offs. Many on the left, and sometimes the populist right, respond with: "Easy, just tax the rich. Problem solved."

But is it really that easy? Can most of these soaring budget deficits be closed by higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations? The answer is an emphatic "no." And that's not a question of ideology, or of picking winners and losers. It's just a matter of unforgiving math: Deficits have grown too big for even aggressive tax-the-rich policies to fix significantly.

Taxing the rich could be part of a broader deficit "grand deal" where all taxes and spending are up for debate. But it could only ever be a modest part of such a deal, because the potential revenue available from taxing the rich can close only a small portion of our nearly unfathomable deficits.

The Limits of Taxing the Rich

Let's begin with an extreme example. America has about 800 billionaires. Imagine we seized every single dollar of their wealth—every home, property, business, investment, car, and yacht, right down to their kids' teddy bears—and sold it all for full market value.

That would raise enough revenue to finance the federal government for 9 months. Not 9 months out of every year: 9 months one time. Then, with no billionaires left to pillage, it's gone—as is your 401(k), because most of that wealth would've been liquidated out of the stock market.

Even taxing million-dollar earners at 100 percent marginal tax rates wouldn't balance the long-term budget. Not even if each of those taxpayers would keep working for zero net pay (and they would not).

Only slightly more realistically, imagine that President Bernie Sanders gets to implement his dream tax proposal: federal income tax rates as high as 52 percent, an uncapped 15.3 percent payroll tax on all wages, and capital gains tax rates of 62 percent—plus the state tax rates on top of those. Sanders also proposed hitting corporations with a world-leading 35 percent corporate tax rate that includes all multinational income, a wealth tax rate as high as 8 percent, an estate tax rate as high as 77 percent, new financial transaction taxes, and several other surtaxes.

Sanders' tax proposal would set marginal income, capital gains, business, wealth, and estate tax rates at their highest levels in the developed world. Total new revenues: approximately 1.5 percent of GDP, after accounting for losses to dampened economic growth. That is a lot of money. But it's not enough to close more than a fraction of a current-policy budget deficit heading toward 8 percent of GDP in the next decade. And even those revenue figures implausibly assume that people and corporations would continue working, saving, and investing despite combined federal and state marginal tax rates on labor and investment that would approach 80 to 100 percent. 

Two years ago, I ran a model that set every upper-income and corporate tax policy at its revenue-maximizing level without regard to economic damage. It showed roughly 1.5 percent of GDP in new revenues and much slower economic growth. This is not a good tradeoff for an economy. The mathematical reality is that there just aren't enough millionaires, billionaires, and undertaxed corporations to close a 30-year budget deficit of between $115 trillion and $180 trillion, depending on the baseline we use. It is not possible to finance annual deficits heading to $4 trillion in a decade and 14 percent of GDP over the next 30 years on the backs of corporations and only 5 percent of American families. There just are not enough super-rich people to pay for the other 300 million of us. And most of the available tax base resides in that large middle class. 

American Taxes are Highly Progressive

Few Americans understand that our tax code is already extraordinarily progressive—more so than any other nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And it's grown radically more progressive over the past 40 years. The top-earning 20 percent now pays 69 percent of all federal taxes, and the top 1 percent currently pays 25 percent of all federal taxes.

By contrast, the bottom-earning 60 percent of Americans—that's 3 out of 5 taxpayers—pay just 13 percent of total federal taxes, including a combined negative income tax.

Last year the federal government funded 263 days of spending by taxes instead of borrowing. Of that, the top-earning 20 percent funded the government for 201 days, or nearly 7 months. The next 20 percent funded 41 days. And the bottom-earning 60 percent of Americans—which means most of the U.S. population including the median-earners—funded the federal government for just 21 days of the year.

That level of tax progressivity might not be a bad thing. But most of the nation's total income comes from families earning under $400,000. And their dramatically lower current tax rates mean that the large majority of the available remaining tax base resides within the tens of millions of these families. No one likes the idea of raising middle-class taxes, but there's only so much revenue to raise from the wealthy, even at exorbitant tax rates.

Answering the Critics 

Advocates of dramatic tax-the-rich policies often claim enormous potential revenues by invoking: 1) the 1950s income-tax brackets exceeding 90 percent; 2) European tax systems; and 3) corporations that paid little to no taxes last year. The reality is different. 

Those 91 percent income tax rates from the 1950s averaged only 7.2 percent of GDP in federal income tax revenues. As the top tax bracket fell to 70 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, income tax revenues actually rose to around 7.8 percent of GDP. And in the time since all the dramatic reductions of the top income tax rates starting in 1981, federal income tax revenues have averaged 8.1 percent of GDP. So Washington collects more income tax revenues as a share of GDP today with a top tax bracket of 37 percent than it collected in the 1950s with a 91 percent tax bracket. In fact, since 1950 the correlation between the highest income tax bracket and revenues as a share of the economy is -0.25 percent, meaning that higher top tax rates are correlated with lower income tax revenues.

How can eras with higher top tax brackets bring in less overall tax revenue? Because the highest income tax brackets don't tell us much about the total income tax revenues. What matters more are the income thresholds for every tax bracket, the amount of tax preferences and tax deductions, whether the tax system encourages tax avoidance and tax evasion, and—most importantly—broader economic growth rates. Those dials can produce more tax revenues than merely raising upper-income tax rates on a small number of taxpayers.

In fact, almost no one actually paid those old 91 percent tax rates, which kicked in at today's equivalent of a $4.1 million annual income. In 1961, that was only 446 families, and it raised just 0.1 percent of all income tax revenues. Moreover, all of the tax brackets between 52 percent and 91 percent collectively produced just 1 percent more income tax revenue than if we had capped those tax brackets at 50 percent. Those tax brackets won't even pay for 2 days a year of federal spending. People are free to advocate 91 percent tax rates, but they should not point to 1950s America as proof that they raise significant tax revenues that way.

What about the claim that Europe has shown how to finance large welfare states on the backs of the rich? In reality, those nations tax the wealthy at similar rates to the U.S. It is their heavy middle-class taxes that produce the typical OECD nations' 7.5 percent of GDP tax revenue advantage over the US across all levels of government. Specifically, every other OECD nation assesses a value-added tax (VAT)—essentially a sales tax—as high as 27 percent. Without the resulting 7.2 percent of GDP in average VAT revenues, U.S. and OECD tax revenues are nearly equal. Even the social democratic Scandinavian countries that collect 14 percent of GDP more than the US do it almost entirely from their VAT and higher payroll taxes—which come from everyone, not just the rich.

America's top tax brackets for income, capital gains, corporate, and estate taxes are actually all slightly higher than those of the typical OECD nations when merging all levels of government. We've got the most progressive tax system in the OECD because we tax the rich at similar rates as those other countries but we tax middle- and lower-earners dramatically less than they do. So if you want America to tax like Europe, then our middle class is going to get the nastiest surprise of its life. Europe is no longer the caricature Americans imagined decades ago.

Finally: Every year we get reports of a handful of corporations that paid little to no taxes that year, or those "Warren Buffet pays less tax than his secretary" stories. The corporate examples are often the result of shifting income and taxes from one year to the next, which means any real analysis should examine a corporation's taxes over a period of several years. And the corporations paying low taxes over many years are typically either earning most of their income abroad and paying foreign taxes, or taking advantage of tax breaks for business investment and R&D that politicians create to encourage those activities.

Either way, eliminating those tax breaks and taxing these companies more could raise perhaps $100 billion a year. That's real money, but it's not a game-changer in the context of those $4 trillion annual deficits we're heading toward. And, of course, we'd lose the business investment and job creation that comes from those bipartisan incentives. 

Today, many wealthy individuals escape short-term income taxes by receiving most income in capital gains or borrowing against their wealth. The capital gains will eventually be taxed when the investments are sold, unless they carry it through to death. Ensuring that capital gains would be taxed at death or that rich people can no longer easily borrow tax-free against their wealth would be logical reforms—but they wouldn't raise revenue of any significance to our deficits. We will still have to make difficult choices on spending or middle-class taxes.

Put Everything on the Table

None of this means we shouldn't tax the rich more. Fixing a ruinous deficit requires putting everything on the table, including higher taxes on the rich. For example, my deficit reduction blueprint would close the loophole that permanently exempts capital gains from taxation if they're held until death. It would also dramatically scale back upper-income and corporate tax loopholes, and fully fund audits against high-earning and corporate tax cheats.

But we must acknowledge the mathematical reality that our budget deficits have grown so enormous that tax-the-rich policies can't close more than a tiny fraction of them. And also, that much of Europe long ago learned the hard way that going overboard on wealth taxes and steep top income and corporate tax brackets can backfire on the economy. That's why their (non-VAT) tax codes have moved closer to ours. A slow-growing economy can't produce enough revenues to cut its deficit no matter how high its tax rates are. We need higher revenues in the least economically damaging way possible. And yes, if we want to stabilize the debt, that means middle-class taxes will have to rise—and federal spending must be significantly pared back. This includes major spending reforms to Social Security and Medicare's staggering 30-year cash shortfall of $124 trillion.

Neither political party is suicidal enough to tell middle-class voters that their taxes and benefits must also contribute heavily to reining in runaway deficits. So we comfort ourselves with the wishful thinking that millionaires and billionaires can take the entire burden off our hands. But beyond the empty rhetoric, you will never see a specific, fully scored proposal to eliminate most of the long-term deficit by taxing the rich—because mathematically, it's just not possible.

• Camera: Cody Huff
• Graphics: Adani Samat
• Video Editor: James Swanepoel
• Producer: Matt Tabor