Many people seem to believe that we can pay for ObamaCare, overpaid public sector employees and all manner of other government boondoggles by simply raising taxes on the rich. Such people need to learn arithmetic. Mary Katharine Ham does the math:
The combined net worth of every single one of America’s billionaires is roughly $1.3 trillion. It does indeed sound like a “ton of cash� until one considers that the 2011 deficit alone is $1.6 trillion. So, if the government were to simply confiscate the entire net worth of all of America’s billionaires, we’d still be $300 billion short of making up this year’s deficit.
[via Daily Caller]
Comments 1
Do you think it’s good for the US for more and more wealth to be concentrated in fewer hands? In the US now about 85% of wealth is owned by just 20% of people and the top 1% have 35% of the total. This has been getting worse (or probably better from your standpoint) since Reagan. And income gaps have widened at an extraordinary rate - the multiple of CEO pay to workers is about 400 times now whereas in the early 1980s it was less than 100.
Does there come a point where even you would be unhappy with inequality and do you think inequality is correlated with things like health outcomes and crime?
Posted 13 Mar 2011 at 5:15 pm ¶Post a Comment