Tax the Rich! Rick

Rush Limbaugh was talking about an interesting idea. How long could we run the government on the backs of the richest people?

Combined income of 8274 people who make more than $10 million a year is $240 billion

OK, how about lets just take it all! Oh lets be nice, lets leave them each with a million bucks. That only takes $230 billion from them to give to the federal government. (Sorry, states, you'll have to figure out how much of their remaining $1 million to take...)

According to the U.S. Government Printing Office, President Obama's budget for fiscal year 2010 includes outlays of $3,552 billion. That works out to $9,731,506,850 per day. The largest line item is the Department of Defense, at $1,843,835,620 per day. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/browse.html

How long could the government be run on that? 23 days!

World Socialist Web Site in this article: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/us4c-f02.shtml

Some of my comments on their data:

• says top 400 earned $105 billion in total income in 2006. They paid an average of $45 million dollars in taxes each, or a total of $18 billion dollars.
• The rest of the population paid a combined $1 trillion in federal income taxes. In other words, the top 400 earners (who comprise about .0001% of the population) paid slightly less than 1.8% of total federal income tax revenue.
• So they paid about 20,000 times as much task as the rest of the tax payers.
• Their average income of $263 million each, made an average of 20,000 times an income of $13,150 Given that the average income in the US is higher than this, they paid much more than their share.
• The richest 400 wrote off just over half of their tax liability through charitable contributions. Even if they got a full 1 for 1 tax credit for their charitable contributions, that means they contributed at least $18 billion dollars to charities, or 1/20th of all the money received by charities.

Obama proposes $40 billion in infrastructure, just "about 38% of the income in one year for 400 fabulously wealthy Americans."

That's just this year... This wouldn't be a one time event, it would be year after year....

"Last September, when Forbes published its annual list of the wealthiest 400 Americans, it determined that their combined wealth was $1.57 trillion."

That is money that they accumulated, after paying tax on earning it.

And when things like the stock market take a beating, it is their wealth that often evaporates in those "corrections".

How much of this wealth do they have on loan to the government in the form of treasury bonds to try to avoid losing their money in stock market fluctuations?