[rayiner]

No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.

[boroboro4]

Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years).

Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.

[rayiner]

That’s including everyone. The wealth of U.S. billionaires is about $8 trillion total, while the government at all levels spends about $10 trillion annually.

[xyzzyz]

You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.

[boroboro4]

My bad.

However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.

[rayiner]

The point is that billionaire wealth is not that much compared to the government’s current spending, much less what you’d need to support large numbers of immigrants on welfare (as suggested by OP above).

The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.

I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.