Why Eliminating Billionaires is a Bad Idea

It's 2024.  The total wealth owned by the top 1%, meaning millionaires and billionaires combined, is $44 TRILLION dollars.

The cost of Medicare is $14,000 per senior per year.

There are 340,000,000 people in the US.

Medicare for All would cost 4,760,000,000,000 or $4.76 Trillion per year.

If you confiscate ALL the wealth from the top 1%, you'd fund M4A for less than 10 years.

If you assume the cost of $7k per year per person as it does in Scandinavian countries (btw, private insurance in the US is about $7k a person, and still manages to turn a profit), it would still last only 20 years.

9/11/2001 was 23 years ago.

And now you don't have anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit because anyone motivated by money doesn't exist.

Even if you say "we should only be rewarding people who are internally motivated, not people who are motivated by money" you're limited to the number of people who are internally motivated instead of people who are internally motivated plus the number of people who are externally motivated plus the number of people who are motivated by money.

And I don't know about you, but I'd rather have more people working on solutions to problems than fewer people, regardless of their motivations.

Okay, so lets say you tax only billionaires, millionaires are safe, that way you keep entrepreneurship alive.

US Billionaires only have a combined wealth of 4.48 TRILLION.  That's not enough to cover 1 year of Medicare for All, or only 2 years if using the Scandinavian numbers.

Taxing the billionaires ain't the problem.  Spending is the problem.

And you can use this for any desired government project: Housing.

In California, they're spending $44,000 per homeless person per year to provide them with tents and running water.

A studio apartment with all utilities paid would cost about $24,000 in the greater LA area on the open market.

A two bedroom apartment would cost $30,000 a year.

Even assuming the lower private cost, at 85 million families, that's a cost of $2,856,000,000,000 or $2.9 Trillion.

Using the newly monetized and confiscated wealth of every millionaire and billionaire would still only only cover…15 years?

15 years ago, Obama had already completed his first 100 days in office.

Confiscating the wealth of just the billionaires, not the millionaires...maybe 2 years?

The current system, with all its problems, has something that taxing and confiscating doesn't: sustainability.

What makes the Scandinavian social welfare programs work and sustainable isn’t that billionaires are taxed more than American billionaires, it’s that everyone, including the middle class is taxed much more than their American counterparts.  In essence, in Scandinavian countries, everyone still pays for their own healthcare, their own housing subsidies, their own higher education, but they have a middle man - the government, that forces them to pay.  In the US you have the option not to buy, in Scandinavian countries you don’t have the option to not buy.

And we see this in the numbers. In the US, the top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all federal income taxes collected. In Scandinavian countries like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, the top 1% of income earners pay about 20% of all income taxes collected.

To put it another way, the American 99% account for 60% of our federal income taxes and the Scandinavian 99% account for 80% of their income taxes.

Further, the top 1% in Scandinavia consists of individuals earning $82,000 or more a year. Our 1% consists of individuals earning $652,000 or more a year.

Than means in Scandinavia, 80% of income taxes are paid for by people earning less than $82,000 a year.

In the US, only 60% of federal income taxes can be attributed to those earning less than $652,000 a year.

I’m not arguing whether what we have is better or worse because in Scandinavia, they still have billionaires.  They haven’t gotten rid of them.  They actually have more of them on a per capita basis.

And that goes back to my original point - getting rid of billionaires, as many seem to want to do these days, is a horrible idea, that many of the idealized Scandinavian countries, whose systems we seem to long after, haven’t even done themselves.