The Review-Journal’s Thursday editorial was about our nation’s $40 trillion national debt. You argued that taxing the rich wouldn’t reduce the debt, claiming that confiscating all the wealth of U.S. billionaires would fund the government for barely more than a year. But you failed to note that the top 1 percent of the U.S. public holds $45 trillion to $55 trillion in net wealth. Confiscating that would pay off the entire debt.
No one is arguing we should confiscate all this wealth. But a 5 percent yearly tax on that wealth would generate $2.5 trillion per year and pay off the entire debt in less than 20 years. Because the stock market has averaged more than an 11 percent yearly return on investment for the past 50 years, a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 1 percent would not only pay off the debt, it would allow the rich to continue to increase their wealth, simply at a slower rate than they have over the past five decades.
