There are those who say things like "If you taxed every dollar the one percent make, you still couldn't pay for things like America's debt or safety nets like Welfare or Food stamps..." Do you know who usually says those things... Or at least who initiates those claims?... It's usually someone in the one percent before it propagates through the Main Stream Media be fore trickling down to some ignoramus who simply repeats what he or she has heard from somewhere.
The origin is only the first problem with this claim. The next problem with a claim such as this is it's narrow scope. Why not look at this issue retroactively? Why not look at the amount of money that would have been taxed over the decades in which this argument has been made. Let's go back to the 80s when "Greed is good" was popularized. And, let's not take one hundred percent of the money made by the one percent. Let's not even take the highest percent (90 percent) ever levied in taxes on the rich. Let's just take fifty percent. Just looking at one example from one billionaire in 2023 alone would mean at least 250 million of the profit made by Bill Gates on the COVID vaccine would have gone to paying America's bills. Put another way, Bill Gates pushed for the COVID vaccines (but only for those countries that could pay for them) while he invested $50 million dollars in one of the vaccine companies. Bill Gates then took $550 million dollars in profit on this investment before bad mouthing vaccines in favor of a nasal spray for COVID, in which he is now invested. Subtracting his original $50 million dollar investment leaves $500 million in profit and taking 50 percent of that in taxes gives the government $250 million dollars for basically one transaction. This example represents just one transaction made in just one day, week, month, or however long it took to sell however many shares Gates had invested in that pharmaceutical company. Imagine how much could have been taxed on all of the other investments made over the more than three decades (that 30 years) of investments and/or income of the one percent. Let's do some math.
According to Wikipedia... I know it's biased, but let's go with it)... According to this source, as of April of 2023, there were 735 billionaires, so that means that simply taxing one billion from each of these billionaires over there years would have meant about $367 billion dollars that you and I didn't have to paying taxes over the past 30 years. So, $367 billion divided by 30 years means roughly $12 billion per year that the 99.99 percent would not have had to pay every year for the last 30 years. Now, if that excess tax money went to 75% of the nation... I know 75 percent is more than the number of people taxes in America, but let's go with it... So, approximately 250 million Americans would have saved approximately $12 billion dollars every year in taxes. $12 billion divided equally... I know it wouldn't have been divided equally, but let's go with it... $12 billion divided equally by 250 million equals $48 dollars less per year. Multipled by 30 years, that comes to $1,440.
This may not seem like much, but the numbers were assumed much lower at every step and the timeframe did not account for the profit and/or income made for each year of the three decades referenced, yet even then it's close to what Biden gave us during the COVID lockdowns, which according to thar administration, stimulated the economy. The point this exercise was meant to highlight was that allowing the rich to get richer only succeeds in making the rest of us more poor and powerless. In Capitalism, money means power. Maybe we should wrest some of both back from the rich.
