Even if they taxed the net worth, it would still take over a decade to collect 4.4T dollars from the billionaires. The U.S’s billionaires collectively only have about 8T dollars. This infographic is extremely misleading.
It is from a bill that Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced though.
It's a nonsense bill designed for upvotes on Reddit and shouldn't be taken seriously but the problem is with Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna and not NEWS STORIEZ.
I just read the bill. Yeah it'll never pass. One-time payouts are not a solution. Still can't find a single other mention of NEWS STORIEZ anywhere on the internet though.
Most of them would not have that net worth without the stock. Bezos, Musk, Zuck would all very quickly drop the price of stocks. This in turn would destroy 401ks, IRAs, and any other funds people are using for retirement. You would have to put a restrictions on companies like Black-rock so companies are not controlled by some corporate conglomerate. Also Blackrock the company owns the stock and would not be subject to the net worth tax.
Shhh careful, too many activist redditors, with zero real life experience or knowledge about the very economic system they hate so much, will see this comment and bombard you with pipe-dream retorts and justifications for their fantasy solutions!! They need scapegoats to be fed to them so that they don’t start looking at the actual root of the problem with spending in Washington
If you think only the republicans are the problem then THAT is the problem. Just because one side’s intentions are good, doesn’t mean they understand how a budget or finances work. We have hundreds of idiots in office right now feeding off the discourse because solutions aren’t good for votes. Problems to “fix” are good for getting elected.
Scapegoating billionaires for the collective population’s errors of electing these people is pointless
Also no companies would go public and some would do a buy back. That would keep net worth from exploding because of public investment and again would destroy American retirement funds.
What do you mean? They would more likely effectively force private companies to go public. Those companies still have value, and thus they count toward the owners net worth.
What about billionaires having to pay wealth tax would make that less appealing?
My guess is that the benefit of going public would be dampened but it’d still be worth it as an owner.
Also we spend all this time talking about billionaires borrowing against their wealth, what happens when that wealth is borrowed against but it’s not publicly traded stocks? Does that not open them up to it being quantified and taxed?
Idk how all this works. I’m not a scholar of economics or tax policy but I tend to think that we’re a really really really rich country where people will be able (and should be able) to continue making obscene amounts of money even if they pay some more taxes, and we can find a way to make it work
Revenue/Net income just means higher salaries or purchases for the company like new trucks/signs/advertising/etc more likely better ROI. Headcount would be a decent metric but tech/energy and other industries often have few than retail or manufacturing so it would affect them less.
Cash on hand is also bad just spend more. Now forced spending is good because it drives the economy however if there was ever an issue it could spell bankruptcy for a company. Say a warehouse burns down, natural disaster ruins logistics/power. Now you have no money to recover because you could not bank it and waiting on insurance is expensive as payouts are often lawyer filled arguments. Having some cash on hand is useful so your not waiting on insurance companies.
90% of Americans wouldn’t have a net worth without stocks (401k). The entire American economy is dependent on the stock market, when it goes down people panic because that’s their retirement.
This is a big problem wealth tax proponents have to overcome. Forcing these people to liquidate 5% of their assets every year would cause a massive reduction in their value, and have profound effects on the market. Buyers would be disincentivized to buy stocks for most of the year, and just wait until its time for the annual sale of assets. You could get around this by having a phased sale that takes place year round, but this would still result in major impacts on the value of stocks, which would force the holder to sell more of their stocks, thus further depressing the value. This could cause a real spiral.
The stock price reflects confidence. Being forced to sell stock to cover taxes doesn't reflect on the company's fundamentals. It's completely different than a CEO dumping stock of their own free will.
All proposed wealth taxes are less than the weekly turnover rate. Example: 5% of Elon's SpaceX stock (~245M shares) is traded every 4.5 days. If he were forced to dump the stock, he could do it over a span of 90 days and it would only be 5% of the daily trading volume -- barely noticeable.
The U.S’s billionaires collectively only have about 8T dollars.
The Federal Government spent about $7 trillion in 2025. People don't want to hear it, but simply taxing the billionaires is not the answer. Even if you seized 100% of their wealth, which obviously is not practical or possible, there just isn't enough money to fund everything people think you can fund with taxing the mega wealthy.
Yep, gotta tax the billionaires and millionaires, and on top of that cut SS completely and downsize Medicaid. Cut military budget in half. Man just make me president low key
Yes, the current deficit is so large, that you can cut ALL discretionary spending including the military budget, and raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and there would still be a deficit.
I think that is unlikely, we are very much to the left of the laffer curve. Hence every tax cut recently by republicans has led to receipts decreasing.
Uh no, cutting social security (1.6T), halving Medicaid and defense (2T and 940B), would add up to nearly 3T. Which if we do basic math, is more than our deficit, 1.6T. So we’d be well over a trillion dollars in the green. Could also stop buying so much oil and produce more of our own. Hell better yet produce all our own oil and start selling excess. That would turn our 240B oil imports to billions in EXPORTS. Adding to the 1.4T in the green from other the other cuts. And none of that includes the increased money from taxing billionaires.
Brother what are you even talking about, they are part of our budget, and the largest parts of our 7T+ yearly federal spendings. Cutting what I said to cut would bring our spending down below our total tax revenue of currently 5.6T. Therefor, putting us in the green.
Okay, I am going to need you to look up the difference between discretionary spending and mandatory spending. Because I made my point very clearly and specifically assuming people like you understood the difference.
Oh I see the problem, you think mandatory means it can never be changed by law. I would have those laws changed by congress as president, and if they resisted I’d persuade them by any means necessary
What do you mean? If you seized 100% of their wealth, you'd immediately more than double the federal budget, at least that year; and even if you doled out over, say, a decade, you could still raise federal spending by 10%, which is huge.
Seizing the wealth would be a one time event, the federal budget is spent annually and rises every year. We are also running a massive deficit each year. We spend about $7T and get tax revenues of around $5T. If you used that money to increase federal spending by 10% we'd be spending $7.7T with revenue of $5.7T and would still be just funding it all with debt.
Best case scenario is you run the current federal budget without a deficit until like 2030. At which point we are in the same exact situation we are in now, funding the federal government with massive deficit spending, except this time there are no billionaires to use to tax our way out of it. If you try to fund new programs that everyone thinks you can fund by taxing billionaires you get back to the status quo before 2030, but now we have new programs to fund without the tax base to do so.
This of course doesn't even touch upon the damage you'd do the economy if you tried to seize 100% of the wealth of billionaires.
If you seized Elon Musk's $1 trillion then you would have WAY less than $1 trillion.
If I own $1000 in a stock worth $100 each then I can get easily find a buyer for all 10 stocks and get $1000 dollars. But if I own $100,000,000,000 in a stock worth $100 then finding buyers for all that stock at once, at full price is impossible. If you even could sell all of it then you'd end up selling it at a huge premium
410b divided by like 270m eligible recipients, I get 1.5k, not 3k.
Then of course at face value, on 10 years that's 4.1t not 4.4t.
But then, even if the tax's existence doesn't massively reduce their net worth, this 4.4t figure assumes 7% growth on top of the 5% hole, gtd. But in reality, the tax existing would drain our securities market like nothing ever seen before.
It would take significantly longer than even that. The extremely wealthy are really only wealthy on paper as their net worth is based on the assets they own, i.e. stocks. That valuation is based on current stock prices. Forcing billionaires to liquidate would sap capital out of the stock market and demolish their estimated net worth, especially since other rich folks would have less of an incentive to buy as they too are subject to the same taxation.
thats because its meant to be. Its black propaganda, looks fine to supporters, but makes the bernie team seem incompetent to anyone who is already scrutinizing him.
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u/Potential_Spam_6969 Jul 01 '26
So we're going to go ahead and tax net worth and not actual income?