Tax The Rich!

Our national politicians want to solve our budget deficit by taxing the rich. How well would that go?

Forbes released the list of billionaires so we have some numbers we can use.

Let's see ... if we took ALL of Bill Gate's wealth ($56GB) and applied that to our annual budget deficit ($1600B) there would still be $1544B to pay. We would actually need steal from about 30 Gate's to pay for JUST ONE year of our deficit.

Let's expand our search to the world's billionaires - after all, there are 1210 of them. Combined, they have $4500B. Yup, that would cover the deficit for 2.5 years. What if we applied that to our national debt? Nope, not enough. We're still short nearly ten thousand billion dollars ($10,000,0000,000,000).

Ahhhh.... but the smart people realize we don't tax WEALTH, we tax INCOME!

Check out this article:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/04/why_we_cant_tax_ourselves_out.html

If the highest rate of 35% were raised by a factor of 20% to 42%, then the additional tax revenue would be $43.5 Billion, not much of a dent in $1,665.0 Billion.  So, let's raise the rate by a factor of 50% to 52.5%; the additional revenue would be $108.9 Billion.  Still nowhere near enough, so let's just tax it at a rate of 100%, bringing in an additional $404.8 Billion.  Unfortunately the country is still $1,260.0 Billion in the hole for the year.

There are about a million millionaires in the US. If the gov't took a million bucks from from everyone who had at least a million, that would reduce the deficit to 600 billion.

I guess Obama was wrong ... there simply aren't enough "rich" people out there to balance the budget on their backs. Perhaps that's why he's focusing on the upper middle class - those who earn more then $200k, or or $250k as a family. Or like our Governor, Mark Dayton, who ran on a platform of lowering it to $120k and $150k. At least he is realistic. It is unfortunate that our elected republicans and democrats put us into this mess.

So who else can we tax? Let's see... the middle class? No, then it would like the government is hurting families. Hm, how about the poor? They don't pay any taxes as it is, right? Yeah, YOU go on TV and tell people you'll tax the poor. You won't get a second term.

Ok. We can't tax any more. The obvious solution is to cut spending. Let's see... that didn't go so well when President Bush sat in the Oval Office, and with our current republican congress it still isn't going so well. What did they propose to but? $100 billion? Only $1500 billion to go!

No, we all know who is going to pay for this spending:

Your children.