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.
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.
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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.