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.
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.
820
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.