You’ve probably seen the memes, the yard signs, and the screaming cable-news panels: “Tax the rich!” It’s the go-to solution for every progressive who’s ever sipped a $9 oat-milk latte while scrolling TikTok. Bernie Sanders thunders about billionaires like they’re Bond villains. AOC wears a dress that says “Tax the Rich” to the Met Gala, where a ticket to get in costs $75,000. Elizabeth Warren wants a wealth tax, but receives donations from billionaires. But, the idea is simple: the ultra-wealthy are hoarding trillions, and if we just take a little more from them, we can fund free college, free healthcare, free ponies, and probably free therapy for everyone who’s mad about billionaires existing. It feels righteous. It polls well with the “math is racist” crowd that can't balance a checkbook. Unfortunately, it’s about as effective as trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a garden hose.
"Eat the rich" sounds great. How dare those billionaires have more money than they can ever spend, while you are struggling to make ends meet. But are they really the problem? Well, let's do some simple math. The U.S. federal government spent roughly $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. Seven. Trillion. Dollars. That’s $7,000,000,000,000. That’s enough to give every American about $20,000. To put that in liberal-arts-major terms: it’s a comically large number. It’s so large that if you spent $1 million a day, every day, it would take you 19,178 years to burn through it. We are currently spending it in one year.
Now here’s the fun part progressives never mention when they’re screaming "Eat The Rich": even if tomorrow morning the government seized every single dollar of the Forbes 400 richest Americans’ wealth, $6.6 trillion as of late 2025, that would fund the federal government for about 344 days. Yes, you read that right. We could literally eat every single one of the 400 richest people in America, liquidate their Teslas, their yachts, their weird modern art, their LA mansions, their Miami penthouses, and Jeff Bezos’s stupid big boat, and we would still run out of money before the next Thanksgiving turkey drop. And that’s being generous. That number is only the Forbes 400. Add in the other 500-ish U.S. billionaires and you might squeak past one full year, maybe 14 months
Well, let's take it a step further: seize every dollar from all the world's billionaires, about $16 trillion total, depending on how the stock market did that day. Again simple math shows that would fund the entire US government for roughly 2 years and 3 - 4 months, or it would pay off 42% of the national debt.
And then what? Then the money is gone, the billionaires are now broke, and federal spending hasn’t dropped by a single dime. So in just over two years you’re exactly back where you started, except now there’s no billionaires left to rob.
If confiscating every last dollar from all the world’s billionaires wouldn’t even fix America’s problems, how could merely taxing them more possibly save the entire planet?
Let’s talk about the guy liberals love to hate on the most. Elon Musk paid an estimated $11 billion in taxes in 2021 alone. Eleven. Billion. Dollars. That is, to this day, the largest individual tax payment in American history. The man paid more in taxes in one year than the entire GDP of Iceland.
Yet somehow, in the progressive fever dream, this still isn’t enough. The same people who can’t tell you what a woman is want to punish the one guy who actually sent rockets to space and brought them back in one piece.
Here’s what they conveniently ignore: Elon’s companies have paid hundreds of billions of dollars in salaries to their workers. Tesla alone has about 125,000 employees. Average total compensation is well north of $150,000 when you include stock grants (which, yes, are also taxed). That’s roughly $18 - 20 billion a year in paychecks from Tesla alone. SpaceX is smaller but pays engineers like they’re printing money. Add xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X, and you’re easily looking at another $5 - 8 billion annually.
That’s $25 billion+ every single year going to teachers, engineers, factory workers, baristas who work at the Tesla factory café, the janitors, the security guards, real people with mortgages, kids, and Costco memberships. Those salaries get taxed again at the state and local level. The companies pay payroll taxes. The employees spend the money and pay sales tax. This has a positive ripple effect for the economy.
So when AOC says “billionaires shouldn’t exist,” what she’s really saying is “hundreds of thousands of six-figure jobs shouldn’t exist.” Bold strategy.
Progressives love to point at Europe and sigh dreamily: “They have fabulous healthcare, fast trains, six weeks of vacation, and they get it all by properly taxing the rich!”
Okay, Karen from Portland, let’s look at what actually happens when you try that in real life.
Europe’s tax rates look terrifying on paper, top income tax rates of 45-57%, wealth taxes in a few countries, the whole socialist buffet. But the super-rich are about as loyal to high-tax countries as a cat is to a bathtub.
The moment the taxman gets too grabby, the billionaires and their yachts simply… relocate.
Bernard Arnault (richest man in Europe most years) is French on his passport, but the real action happens in Belgium, Luxembourg, or good old Monaco (population 39,000, billionaire density higher than anywhere else on Earth). Monaco has zero income tax, zero capital gains tax, and more billionaires per square foot than anywhere else, and it’s a quick helicopter ride from Nice.
Same story across the continent:
The pattern is so consistent it’s almost comical. High wealth taxes = rich people leave = government gets less money than expected = tax quietly repealed.
Result in 2025?
United States: 902 billionaires. Entire continent of Europe: ~772 billionaires total.
Yes, one single country has more billionaires than all 44 countries of Europe put together.
And it’s not even close.
The ultra-wealthy in Europe either (a) move to a tax haven, (b) negotiate special deals (Switzerland’s famous lump-sum taxation), or (c) structure everything through holding companies so their effective rate is laughably low.
Meanwhile in America, when Elon sells Tesla stock, or Bezos sells Amazon shares, or Zuck or Gates cash out even a fraction of their holdings, the U.S. Treasury gets a check with a lot of zeros. Europe tried the progressive fantasy hardcore. Most of them gave up because it simply didn’t work. The rich left, took their companies, investments, and jobs with them, and the countries were left holding an empty Louis Vuitton bag.
America’s system isn’t perfect, but at least the golden geese mostly stay in the yard, and when they lay a golden egg and sell it, Uncle Sam gets a massive cut. So the next time someone tells you “we should be more like Europe,” politely remind them: Europe already tried being Europe. They quietly stopped or lost their golden geese.
Remember the 2025 government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history? Yeah, the one that dominated the news for weeks, had talking heads predicting bread lines and zombie apocalypse?
How did that work out for you personally?
Did your mail stop? No. Did Social Security checks bounce? No. Did the military stop getting paid? (Eventually they did get backpay.) Did planes fall out of the sky because air traffic controllers walked off the job? Nope, those are essential. Did your bank fail to load? Surprisingly it still worked.
Most Americans kept going to work, buying groceries, streaming Netflix, and arguing with strangers on the internet exactly like normal. National parks closed, some passports got delayed, federal workers missed a few paychecks (and got them later), but the apocalypse never arrived.
If the entire federal government can shut down for weeks and the average person’s biggest complaint is “I can’t visit Yosemite right now,” maybe, just maybe, the federal government is a little bit… bloated? Maybe we don’t need all $7 trillion? Maybe we could, I don’t know, try living on half of that for a year and see if anyone notices?
Crazy idea, I know.
Speaking of things no one would miss…
California’s high-speed rail project has spent roughly $15 billion so far. What do Californians have to show for it? A really expensive stretch of track in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t connect to anything, goes nowhere, and is projected to cost another $120 billion+ to maybe finish someday, maybe, if the money fairy shows up.
Fifteen billion dollars. That’s enough to give every teacher in California a $300,000 bonus. Or fix every pothole in Los Angeles. Or buy every homeless person in San Francisco each a nice one-bedroom apartment. Instead we have… some concrete viaducts that look like a Lego set a toddler abandoned.
And no one got fired. No one went to jail. The same bureaucrats who turned a $33 billion project into a $135 billion money bonfire are still collecting pensions. The politicians who championed it are still in office or moved on to higher office. There are zero consequences for wasting taxpayer money at the governmental level. But the money had to go somewhere? Why isn’t there any investigations? Probably because it's racist or something.
The Pentagon has failed its last eight audits, EIGHT, and we still write them checks for $900 billion a year. We built a pier in Gaza for $230 million that floated away in a storm. We spent $20 billion on Afghan security forces that evaporated the second we left. The government wastes money like a drunk sailor on shore leave, only difference, the sailor eventually runs out of money.
Yet the very same people who can’t build a train in seventeen years think the solution is to give them more money by chasing Elon Musk, and screaming TAX THE RICH.
Here’s a wild thought: before we talk about taxing productive people more, how about we stop setting taxpayer money on fire first?
Stop the California money furnace. Demand the Pentagon pass an audit. Cut the stupid studies, the corporate welfare, the consultants who produce PowerPoint decks no one reads. Fire half the middle managers in every agency. Turn entire departments into block grants and let states handle it.
The federal government could probably run on half their current budget (if not more) without most Americans noticing, based on the 2025 shutdown evidence. We know this because we literally just tested it in real time and the sky didn’t fall.
Taxing the rich feels good. It’s emotionally satisfying. It makes great bumper stickers.
Actually fixing spending? That’s hard. That requires saying no to powerful interests. That requires admitting the government is terrible at spending money.
But it’s the only thing that actually works. So next time someone screams “Tax the rich!” at you, maybe try to explain some simple math to them.
