I & I Editorial BoardThe theater kids who have taken over the Democratic Party have brought to the forefront the long-held proposition of the left to tax the rich to pay for a utopian future. Even before the DSA surge, the party insisted there is plenty of money out there, all the government had to do was grab it and problems would be solved. It’s nonsense of course. An even more draconian tax structure than the one we have now wouldn’t fund the federal government for even a year.
Washington, now facing a $40 trillion debt, spent more than $7 trillion in fiscal 2025, doling out an average of almost $21,000 per person. Democrats have always argued that if they could just tax the rich hard enough, they could erase all of society’s ills while eliminating deficits and debt. Either they know better and can’t help but lie, which is an organizational foundation of communism, or their math is below grade-school level.
Using IRS data to make its case, the Cato Institute says that if the federal government in 2023 “had confiscated every dollar earned over half a million dollars, it still would have run a budget deficit.”
If that won’t work, then try harder, right? Go after the villains, the billionaires. So what if Washington seized every asset they owned, not just their annual income, but “every home, property, business, investment, car, and yacht, right down to their kids’ teddy bears — and sold it all for full market value?” asks researcher Jessica Riedl.
Wouldn’t that get the job done? Nope.
“That would raise enough revenue to finance the federal government for nine months,” she says. But not nine months every year. Nine months one time only. “Then, with no billionaires left to pillage, it’s gone — as is your 401(k), because most of that wealth would’ve been liquidated out of the stock market.”
If mugging the billionaires isn’t enough, then we just need more rich people to tax. Let’s hit million-dollar earners with 100% marginal tax rates. That should do it. Not so, says Riedl. It “wouldn’t balance the long-term budget,” even if every one “of those taxpayers would keep working for zero net pay (and they would not).”
Let’s try yet one more time. Let’s tax corporations until they can’t be taxed any more.
Still won’t work, says Riedl.
“The mathematical reality is that there just aren’t enough millionaires, billionaires, and undertaxed corporations to close a 30-year budget deficit of between $115 trillion and $180 trillion.”
The facts won’t stop the Democrats and their socialist progeny taking over the party. They will continue to produce shameless, execrable political grifters such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Keith Ellison, Ro Khanna, Zohran Mamdani and the larger assortment of those who blindly vote Democrat.
Their goal? They want no limits on their political power, no boundaries to protect property rights nor the product of everyone else’s labor, no dissent from an agenda that Karl Marx would approve of. They need other people’s money to further their revolution and will go to any means to take it.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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You blame the “execrable political grifters” like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. You also blame those who vote Democratic. But in my opinion all this blame must be shared.
The mainstream leftist media with its klaxons of “tax the rich” and “spend other peoples money” should also jump in the gravy boat.
As should our teachers in public schools and professors at universities. They provided the “intellectual” fodder that that prompts their students to vote for socialistic/communistic/big government blather.
A wonderful analysis. The problem is that Congress is spending “other people’s money”, not their own. I have a modest suggestion: Congress can make no contributions to their retirement accounts for any year in which there is a budget deficit. In the spirit of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal, we will make it retroactive; say to the last year we had a balanced budget. All contributions and earnings for this period would be returned to the federal government for the express purpose of retiring debt. I am not holding my breath waiting for this sensible policy to be enacted; I am certain it would go down to a bi-partisan defeat.
I am not a politician, I am a retired engineer, one of those who understands numbers. The article clearly points out the salient numbers but is silent on the why. Why did we allow ourselves to get in this unsolvable mess. I see three reasons; the Democrats, the Republicans and we voters. We have three generations of people who flunked math in high school; they graduated and now vote. Career politicians learned, three generations ago, that they could buy their nice office by giving away the life savings of future generations, transferring it to their constituents and to heck with the deficits.
The bill is now due and payable, so who do we stick it to? I propose we drag all the thirty year big shots out of their old folks home and shove them under a bridge. The reds who overthrew the Tzar had other ideas but I cannot be a proletariat, I can do math.
Once they confiscate even a small amount of property because we are a highly leveraged economy the unwind would come fast and hard.