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Comment by khaki54 | Hacker News Reader

If you seized the entirety of assets of US billionaires, you could only run the country for 6 months max. So it proves immediately that simply taxing them more isn't the correct answer and won't have any meaningful effect whatsoever.

Anyway, Federal taxes are income based at this time and most billionaires do not have income except when they sell an asset for a profit. Billionaires do tend to pay huge amounts in state and local taxes which are used more efficiently anyway. One billionaire leaving a town during covid due to increased tax burden and SALT exemption reduction effectively bankrupted them and the school district.

A baby born 5 seconds ago already inherits 100k in debt which is nothing other than a delayed exponential tax on top of all the other ones he or she will pay in their life. We have to reduce spending by a massive amount to get to fiscal sustainability.

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> We have to reduce spending by a massive amount to get to fiscal sustainability.

How does that jive with other countries that have both higher spending and fiscal sustainability?

> If you seized the entirety of assets of US billionaires, you could only run the country for 6 months max.

That seems unlikely, given that we can run the country for 6 more months without doing that, which makes me suspect the rest of your revenue and spending analysis.

Come on friend. I'll rephrase it slightly. All that money would only fund the US gov 6 months. The reality though it that it would destroy the country at a minimum.

What I will say is that during covid billionaires expanded greatly. So, the $6.1T that billionaires are worth, would fund 11 months of US spending ($6.9T)

Sure, and I'm not a "billionaires shouldn't exist at all" person, so I'm not saying we should have a 95% wealth tax on billionaires. I'm also not proposing that we fund the government solely by taxing billionaires.

I'm saying we should tax them significantly more than we do now, and we should also tax multi-millionaires a lot more than we do now, and we should focus on reducing the deficit by raising revenues. We don't need to close the gap with all 6.9T in spending, we need to reduce the deficit of $800B.

We should look at raising an addition 200-600B in revenue, putting the burden largely on the backs of the extremely wealthy (and not just billionaires, but if you're in a household making more than half a million dollars a year), by heavily taxing their income, capital gains, and estates. We should look at moderate reductions in our defense spending. With approaches like that we could bring our deficit down into the $100-$200B range, which would be a more reasonable steady state for us.

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