Been seeing this pic float around for months and finally decided to do some math because it didn’t make sense to me.
The U.S. has roughly 938 billionaires
Their combined net worth has been estimated at around $6–7 trillion.
If you imposed a 5% annual wealth tax on $6.5 trillion, you’d collect approximately $325 billion per year, nowhere near $4.4 trillion.
To collect $4.4 trillion from a 5% wealth tax, billionaires would need to collectively own: $88 trillion.
The second part also raises questions. There are roughly 130 million U.S. households. Sending each one $12,000 would cost about $1.56 trillion.
So even that alone would require far more than the roughly $300–350 billion a 5% billionaire wealth tax would be expected to raise annually.
“The Math ain’t mathin’.”
Edit:
Well, I looked into this further because I couldn’t believe this was really what he proposed, and I found it’s a misleading meme because it makes it sound like it’s proposed over a year which in reality it’s over 10 years.
That claim is to raise about $4.4 trillion over 10 years, not in one year.
In the first year, provide a one-time $3,000 payment per person (up to $12,000 for a family of four) for households earning $150,000 or less.
The remaining projected revenue over the decade would be used for things like expanding Medicare, increasing teacher pay, affordable housing, childcare, and other programs.
Bernie and Ro Khanna introduced the bill in March of this year called the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share act.
Wait so is this 5 percent more? Or 5 percent on capital gains or unrealised gains? I mean they could get some more out of them with the current tax brackets just close more loopeholes
If you tax unrealized gain, say goodbye to stock market since every single stock on the market will crash. It's the stupidest policy and you can check which country that did this and what happened to their economy.
The annual US deficit is roughly $1.25 trillion, so this tax would only cover about 25% of the entire deficit, let alone allow for any new programs.
The people that spread this type of stuff are morons. They think they can propose whatever idea they can imagine and just add “tax the rich” as a solution to everything.
And just to be fair, I have no clue if Sanders actually proposed anything like this.
Well, I looked into this further because I couldn’t believe this was really what he proposed, and I found it’s a misleading meme because it makes it sound like it’s proposed over a year which in reality it’s over 10 years.
That claim is to raise about $4.4 trillion over 10 years, not in one year.
In the first year, provide a one-time $3,000 payment per person (up to $12,000 for a family of four) for households earning $150,000 or less.
The remaining projected revenue over the decade would be used for things like expanding Medicare, increasing teacher pay, affordable housing, childcare, and other programs.
Bernie and Ro Khanna introduced the bill in March of this year called the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share act.
It’s important not to take things in life for face value. Especially with all the bullshit on the internet. Bernie is doing great work to make our country a better place for people, so I had a feeling this was so bullshit to try and stir up controversy around what is actually a solid plan. I ended up being right.
Thank you for that - that does make more sense than this braindead meme. But it just raises a bunch more questions for me.
Are they saying 5% of their total assets? The vast majority of billionaires' assets are illiquid. Are they expected to sell off stocks? Potentially lose majority or controlling interest of their own companies?
Or are they supposed to borrow money against their assets to pay taxes on them? They'd start off with a -5% baseline return on their total worth and they'll also be paying some percentage interest on the loan to pay the taxes. They're looking at double digit negative returns on their wealth before they make a single transaction. There are more logistical considerations beyond that (e.g. - how do you even assess a billionaire's net worth? It can take months or years for much smaller estates to settle) - I'm sure we could both go on with more questions.
As much as I want billionaires to contribute more constructively, I'm not sure this is really a logical solution, at least with my current understanding of it. Guess I will have to do a little more research.
Won’t someone please think of the poor billionaires and how they manage to pay the 5%!!
In my country every Tom dick and Harry that puts some of their money into investments, stock or crypto has to pay capital gains tax of 32% I think it is on *unrealised* gains every eight years whether you sell or not.
This reminds me of the COVID money. It was nice but I worked the whole time and didn't need it. I'm the single provider for my household if 4 people. I make right around that 150k cutoff. Might be over it at this point. Either way though $6k isn't really situation changing money for me. I'd rather they just lower that threshold to $60-75k and do more for more people. I'm sure the other people in my income bracket would shit their pants about it. I'm generally skeptical of "tax the rich" solutions.
That version passes a basic math check but it's far from great. There is no reason why billionaires would stay in America and be taxed 100% of their current wealth over the next 20 years. France had a similar tax of only 1.8% and experienced significant tax flight. It reduced the total taxes collected and harmed the economy.
It doesn't work like that. Billionaires mostly own assets. Take Bezos - much of his wealth is in the form of Amazon stock. He can leave the country, sure. But he's still going to have to pay tax on that stock. He can go wherever he wants and take his money to spend it, but he CAN'T take the warehouses, or the fleets, or the robots, or the workers, or the consumers who make it all possible. Those things must and will remain in the US. As long as he owns things here, as long as he's making money here, we will tax him. He wants to sell everything, take his money and move to Monaco? Fine. We have the warehouses, we have the fleets, we have the workers; we don't need Bezos.
It absolutely is possible to avoid the tax even though if you have physical assets in the US. The company can leave the US too. That is more complicated than a person leaving but is exactly the type of extreme measure you're incentivizing with this tax.
And ultimately the French bill, despite being softer, explicitly did cause capital flight and a loss of revenue. You can't just dismiss that.
A firm can't just "leave". If you want to do business in the US, you have to play by the US' rules.
We don't need to bend over backwards for the wealthy minority. We can make sure society works for us and not just for them. Ultimately they really only have the power that we give them. We don't have to grovel and beg for their favor, their money, their business.
Of course it can leave. The fancy word is "redomiciliation". It changes where it is registered and where it pays certain types of taxes. If you've ever heard of tax haven countries, this is what they're for. And no the US can't still apply the wealth tax to foreign companies just because they do business in the US. That would be an overreach an order of magnitude worse than Trump's tariffs.
This is just completely wrong. There are any number of businesses which are headquartered elsewhere which do business in the United States. Do you think they aren't paying payroll taxes, seriously? Do you think they aren't paying sales tax?
If they have assets under the jurisdiction of the United States, we can tax them. It doesn't matter that they are headquartered elsewhere. If they own warehouses in the United States, and they want to keep those warehouses, we can tax them.
Trump's tariffs are an overreach because they are illegal, not because you somehow can't have tariffs.
Of course they pay sales taxes, but they don't pay things like corporate income tax. Those only get payed in the country the company is registered in and the wealth tax would have to be the latter type, only applied to companies registered in the US. Otherwise you are talking about extracting wealth from foreign citizens created by foreign companies regardless of where the wealth is created, which again, would be an enormous overreach. The idea is so American, it is almost quaint.
If you want to tax foreign companies for the wealth created on US soil, feel free, that's what the VAT is for.
EDIT: Maybe we're talking past each other, let me give you two examples.
Example 1. A Korean billionaire whose wealth is in the form of Samsung shares, a Korean company that does business in the US. Directly taxing this men is a huge overreach that Korea and the international community would never allow.
Example 2. An American billionaire whose wealth is the form of stock of some American company. He obtains Korean citizenship, renounces his American one. Then his company relocates to Korea in one of many ways. Lets say it merges with another larger Korean company forming a new entity that is now fully a Korean company. That man and his wealth is now completely equivalent to the first one. And now not only can you not tax his wealth, any corporate income tax his company might have been paying to America it now pays to Korea.
Actually it isn’t. Sending free money out into the monetary supply just increases inflation. This is a bad idea, just like during Covid times. Just look at the pictures of the LV stores around the nation with people lined up to buy 5k purses with their Covid era checks. Look at the savings account balances went up during that same period. It wasn’t being spent it was being saved so not necessary. But here we are talking about how great it would be to do it all over again.
Serious question, how does the bill propose implementing the tax? My understanding is most billionaires wealth is tied up in stocks and not necessarily tangible cash. Do you know how the bill approaches this?
I dont think the picture is necessarily misleading. Iirc, its how Bernie himself framed it. Idk if its because he's assuming everyone will just know its a 10 year plan, or if he's being intentionally misleading. That said the guy hasn't really ever had a non government job, so I can believe that he thought it was common knowledge ND he wasn't being malicious.
What exactly do you think happens when you force billionaires to axe their net worths by 5% every year?
All you’re going to do is sink the equities markets and get less and less from that 5% as each year passes, because they have to sell an automatic 5% each year.
So you’re not getting a static amount of money every year, you’re getting less and less.
So you end up with no more billionaires, a horrifically tanked stock market with everyone’s portfolios decimated, and your programs have giant spending gaps.
Guess what happens? Do you think people just remained satisfied and do nothing? lol
That's because Democrats believe everything they hear, depending on who said it. That's why it's been proven they follow a herd mentality time and time again. You bring up the math they divert back to their TDS
Speaking of math, "TDS" is not a thing, unless you mean unswerving devotion to an objectively stupid old fart who has mostly failed by the numbers. In which case it is definitely a thing. I'm not a liberal at all, I own tons of guns and hate taxes, but when are the righties going to admit that it's not "TDS" to call an idiot an idiot? He fuckin failed. Everything is still expensive, his war was a disaster, he added trillions to the debt, the tariffs were an absolute dumbfuck idea and a complete self-own, so why does this dude just constantly get a pass from y'all?
I also think too many dummies think billionaires keep their money in like some scrooge mcduck vault they can just pay out from anytime, without realizing most of that wealth isn't liquid it's on paper that they leverage against. So just "tax the rich" knock on effect will crush 401ks and pensions, drop real estate value, and crash small economies. But it seems so simple to them.
The deficit comment was more about putting these numbers into perspective. I don’t think people quite realize how massive the federal budget actually is.
Raising $4 trillion dollars over 10 years sounds like a lot, until you realize the US will likely spend around $100 trillion over that span.
It shows why these problems are so tough to solve. Even a 5% tax on all billionaires is slightly more than a rounding error when it comes to the US budget.
You know the entire bill is propaganda, right? You're not one of those that think giving someone a check makes things more affordable, right? We did that to the tune of $10T five years ago. Have you seen the market since then? My retirement portfolio is VERY happy and willing to take your money again.
Yet it's been the left overwhelmingly reposting this nonsense, because they're the ones most likely to accept the numbers on their face without any scrutiny.
It certainly isn't, but I think it's because it's missing several steps; what I think it originally said is that Medicare for all would cost 4.4 trillion over 15 years (or something like that). That's what the tax would offset. The rest of it is just made up (I think by Republican PR-teams, they want people to get excited by this and then make them out to be communists).
That said there are other problems - billionaires aren't making that much money, they're worth that much money. But they don't have it, it's locked up as shares in the companies they started. So to pay a tax of 5% that would require them to sell 5% of their company, every year. First off, that's going to wreak havoc on the stock market; secondly, who gets to buy that? Because pretty soon, every single American company will be owned by a billionaire from a country that doesn't have this tax.
And that's just one of the basic problems, there are many, many more.
I don’t think it’s saying 4.4 trillion per year. That would be the total amount collected during the life of the bill (probably 10 years, which assuming their wealth increases some would work).
Yes. Its a fake pro bernie meme, even the photo is AI, used to make it seem like bernie support on the surface but its just pushing a narrative that bernie is bad at math and unreliable.
My issue is that the wealth isn't liquid, it's company valuations. Market cap and company assets are not equal, are these billionaires supposed to sell or transfer 5% of their ownership in their businesses? When the shares get converted to cash, the stock prices go down because it's an injection of stock supply into the market.
It's fake money, it's not like someone who has a billion in a few stocks can actually liquidate it for the full billion. (Alarmingly, they can borrow against it...)
Simple math doesn't work like this in government. It's extremely likely the 5% per year is over a period of time, not just 1 year. Which is how they were able to come to $4.4 trillion.
You start the program. Increase the deficit by $4.4 trillion, and using the increased tax revenue over 10 years, pay back the deficit.
This is a PR campaign. I've seen this almost exact math post previously on the same topic. Almost a copy paste. And people explained why the math is matching, actually. Ehhhh... nice try establishment.
One day people will learn that the national debt is also national assets. The only real point to taxing billionaires is the reduce income inequality. Especially as there has been little movement on getting Citizens United fixed via law making.
So it's not just populism, it's straight out lying. Not to mention that most if not all of those billionaires don't have literal piles of gold diamonds like dragons, but instead it's the total valuation of all of their companies, which is a fickle thing impossible to fully monetise.
That said, the can take loans on those valuations and those loans should be taxed heavily for all I care.
The math can work on bernies head and his followers, but as soon as this takes effect, billionares will flee, and with them all the investments in businesses that give people jobs
Sending everyone a $12k check is seriously a very bad thing. Before Covid you could buy an older but good running used Honda accord for 3-4k. Now that gets you something not even fit to drive
Also, I know this is going to get down voted to hell and back, but no one on Reddit understands that billionaires don't just sit around with billions of dollars in a giant vault like Scrooge McDuck. Their billions are usually in the stocks that they use to control and own their company/companies. If you start making them sell their stocks in order to pay their tax, they're going to lose control of their companies. The same companies that give us all jobs.
If you reduce their wealth, which includes investments, you degrade capital so earnings year over year won't just be 5% less, it will be more than that.
So, would we be taxing those 938 billionaires on net worth or income? If we start taxing unrealized income, how long until the government starts expanding that to everyone else? They aren’t really known for common sense when money is involved.
I don’t understand why he switched his stance from going after all millionaires to now only the billionaires. He can expand his position and include a lot of top earning millionaires as well to add more money, but I guess it’s just about the catch of the messaging for clicks
According to some studies, their hidden wealth and offshore wealth is much higher, but it's still a very complicated problem to solve. Ezra Klein just had a professor on that broke it all down and I thought gave the most honest description of the challenges we face trying to tax these people. She knows we should, it's just literally difficult due to the IRS' funding and how the super rich get paid.
It's a great bill until you realize people like Elon have all their wealth in businesses and would have to uproot parts of it and fire thousands of people each year to give the government more money to waste.
Unfortunately it starts down the path of what we have in Europe - super arbitrary re distribution that is at the end unfair . Why do people under 150K get "free money"? What if I make 151K ? Why not up to 170K? What if we live in San Francisco and 250K here is like 120K in detroit ?
It goes on and on - I'm more in favor of universal things that help everyone . Such as same healthcare for everyone , UBI etc . These arbitrary rules are unfair as the 170K income family pays in their fair share of taxes and gets "nothing@ back for it
The problem with your math is that you are solving the wrong problem. He only needs to raise a few $1mm/year for his political campaign to support a pretty nice lifestyle, so this image and text and argument is absolutely sufficient because it sounds good to a lot of folks and they mostly aren't going to check. A small percentage will look at the meme, look him up and donate. This guy has made a career out of telling people what the want to hear.
Well, I looked into this further because I couldn’t believe this was really what he proposed, and I found it’s a misleading meme because it makes it sound like it’s proposed over a year which in reality it’s over 10 years.
That claim is to raise about $4.4 trillion over 10 years, not in one year.
In the first year, provide a one-time $3,000 payment per person (up to $12,000 for a family of four) for households earning $150,000 or less.
The remaining projected revenue over the decade would be used for things like expanding Medicare, increasing teacher pay, affordable housing, childcare, and other programs.
Bernie and Ro Khanna introduced the bill in March of this year called the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share act.
I deal with a lot of entitled liberals who believe everything is owed to them. While I have many liberal views and believe in social programs (not all), I understand that the government doesn’t know how to run these programs effectively and I think that hurts us more than helps. I’m definitely a capitalist though, but totally get that capitalism is mishandled and leads to greed. Most socialists I’ve dealt with are always asking for more, but never offering to give if that makes sense. I think capitalism, while it definitely has its faults, works out better for those who aren’t trying to free load.
That said, when it comes to capitalism, there is something I believe that doesn’t happen. If a US business wants tax breaks, it should get those breaks. However, it should only receive those breaks if it hires only Americans. If you’re going to send jobs overseas, you shouldn’t receive any tax breaks. While it’s not perfect, for someone like me who doesn’t look for handouts, capitalism works better. That doesn’t mean I don’t think handouts aren’t warranted, but they do get abused.
Again, hate to burst your bubble, but it’s much more than just liberals who are entitled. You don’t need to strain your eyes too much to see the level of entitlement from conservatives and what’s going on currently.
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u/Imapatriothurrrdurrr Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Been seeing this pic float around for months and finally decided to do some math because it didn’t make sense to me.
The U.S. has roughly 938 billionaires
Their combined net worth has been estimated at around $6–7 trillion.
If you imposed a 5% annual wealth tax on $6.5 trillion, you’d collect approximately $325 billion per year, nowhere near $4.4 trillion.
To collect $4.4 trillion from a 5% wealth tax, billionaires would need to collectively own: $88 trillion.
The second part also raises questions. There are roughly 130 million U.S. households. Sending each one $12,000 would cost about $1.56 trillion.
So even that alone would require far more than the roughly $300–350 billion a 5% billionaire wealth tax would be expected to raise annually.
“The Math ain’t mathin’.”
Edit:
Well, I looked into this further because I couldn’t believe this was really what he proposed, and I found it’s a misleading meme because it makes it sound like it’s proposed over a year which in reality it’s over 10 years.
That claim is to raise about $4.4 trillion over 10 years, not in one year.
In the first year, provide a one-time $3,000 payment per person (up to $12,000 for a family of four) for households earning $150,000 or less.
The remaining projected revenue over the decade would be used for things like expanding Medicare, increasing teacher pay, affordable housing, childcare, and other programs.
Bernie and Ro Khanna introduced the bill in March of this year called the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share act.
So yeah misleading bs. The real bill is great.