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The US GDP was $17.5 trillion last year. I don't think you're looking at the right numbers. This isn't about seizing wealth, it's just an increase in the top bracket of income taxes.

Anyway the climate plan is more about moving money around than just taking it and throwing it in a hole. Ideally, more wealth would be generated from people actually spending the money for useful things than would be made from the passive investments favored by the ultra-rich.

>"The US GDP was $17.5 trillion last year. I don't think you're looking at the right numbers."

I don't follow. Why do you think GDP is the "right number" instead of tax revenue?

You didn't mention tax revenue in your comment either. My point was you need to look at capital gains and business taxes to get an idea of how much money there is available. Wealth is not relevant and personal income is not the whole picture.

>"You didn't mention tax revenue in your comment either."

Yea, I guess you are correct. I just consider adding to the national debt another form of tax (via inflation).

>"My point was you need to look at capital gains and business taxes to get an idea of how much money there is available."

Still not following. I am concerned with the government spending a very large amount per year. Spending these resources more efficiently seems like low hanging fruit vs just raising taxes on whatever. The idea of confiscating the wealth of the ultra rich is just to demonstrate that they really aren't that rich compared to what the US government is spending.

So if the actual desired outcome was to get, eg this climate project done, then I would expect people to be exploring that option. Plus increased efficiency should be better for the climate...

> So even confiscating all the wealth of the top couple thousand richest people in the world (not just US) would only fund the US government for 2-3 years. And that would be a one-time event.

Why? What do you think happens to money after the government spends it? It vanishes?

See my other posts in this thread. I'd guess the money is largely wasted on stuff like incorrect medical "discoveries" that slow down progress. Ie, the money is being used to create problems that require more future money to fix.

Taxing the rich isn't about generating revenue to make something. It's a reallocation mechanism for dollars that already exist in the economy to things that we want as a body of people.

If this seems radical, notice that this is already part of the American social contract. We already tax people to provide services and invest in long term projects. All this does is change the rates and the allocation direction.

>"Taxing the rich isn't about generating revenue to make something. It's a reallocation mechanism for dollars that already exist in the economy to things that we want as a body of people."

Ok, well here is a department of the government I am familiar with admitting they waste $25-30 billion every year (imo that is an underestimate, but they definitely waste over 50% of their funding on worthless stuff): https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2016/07_01_2016/story3...

So why not reallocate that to whatever this climate project is? And I'm sure there is similar massive waste in other departments too. If 87.5% is representative that is $3.5 trillion per year to be used.

I mean no one actually wants to waste ~$30 billion a year on worthless medical research, right?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. The problem with saying "Half of this research is worthless" is that it's impossible to know which of the research will be worthless before you do the research. As long as the research that was useful produced enough value to justify the system (which, in the case of the NIH I'd venture it does), it's worth doing overall.

This reminds me of the Wanamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

>"The problem with saying "Half of this research is worthless" is that it's impossible to know which of the research will be worthless before you do the research."

Once you know the common problems, it is actually quite easy to spot design flaws or a history of hiding unwanted results. When you know what to look for you can filter out crappy research in a few seconds. It could probably be automated to a large extent.

For example, a common thing in biomed is to have a "headline claim" that x protein/drug/etc influences y behavior/health outcome/etc. But then there is never a scatterplot of x vs y.

Another is lack of "blinding" (hiding the experimental conditions from the researcher/subjects). There are more, but you get the picture. The presence of these baffling practices quickly demonstrates they don't know what they are doing, and the research should not be funded.

> Taxing the rich isn't about generating revenue to make something. It's a reallocation mechanism for dollars that already exist in the economy to things that we want as a body of people.

That simplistic logic fails to account for the fact that pursuing income is an incentive to allocate resources to productive investments that are self-sufficient and pay off tons of taxes directly and indirextly, such as by paying salaries and generating demand.

Once you start to impose communist "reallocation mechanisms", not only are you eliminating incentives for productive investments as they effectively cease to be productive due to state intervention and actually create incentives to move production and industrial capabilities out of the country.

In short, you're advocating that the goose that lays golden eggs should be slautered to get to someone else's eggs.

> Once you start to impose communist "reallocation mechanisms"

You mean, like a heirarchy of preferential tax rates for different income sources where capital income is favored over general income which in turn is favored over labor income?

Robbing someone of 70% of their income is way more aggravating and profoundly totalitarian than a simple progressive tax. It's one thing to grant a small share of your income to the state in order to keep social institutions running, but it's an entirely different thing if the state robs you off the majority of your total income for no reason at all.

In a free and democratic society, a citizen has the right to the fruit of his labour, not just to a small fraction of what he worked for.

You seem to be responding to something other than the post yours is attached to, but:

> Robbing someone of 70% of their income is way more aggravating and profoundly totalitarian than a simple progressive tax.

A 70% top marginal rate isn't taxing (much less “robbing”) 70% of your income, unless your income is literally infinite.

Also, the top marginal rate was at or above 70% for every year from 1936 through 1980, yet for some reason those 44 years aren't usually considered a “profoundly totalitarian” period in US history.