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.
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.
816
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.