| From the Forbes billionaire list 2023[0]: > Globally, we counted 2,640 ten-figure fortunes, down from 2,668 last year. Altogether, the planet’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a drop of $500 billion from $12.7 trillion in March 2022. For comparison (via various wikipedia pages reachable from[1]), the US federal government budget in 2022 was $6.3 trillion (against an income of $4.9 trillion). If 100% of the $12.2 trillion owned by billionaires was seized and annually disbursed at 3% annually for social programs, this would provide $366 billion dollars annually. In 2022, the US spent $747 billion on Medicare alone. Increasing the Medicare budget by %50 seems nice, but it also doesn't seem like it would be a transformational change to society. It may be a better idea to spend a large chunk of the $12.2 trillion immediately on high-upfront-cost things, but I don't have the imagination to come up with good ideas. [0] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget |