Take every dime of the Forbes 400 and it would keep the federal government running a week or two. From Joakim Book at aier.org:
Wealth in a free society is a rough tallying score of how much economic value someone has provided to the rest of us. A rich person’s wealth — bar inheritance and cronyism — is a testament to how much they enriched us.
As Johan Norberg writes in The Capitalist Manifesto
If anything remains of the revenue when employees, suppliers and lenders have been paid for their efforts, it is called ‘profit’ and we are very angry when it’s a large sum. In fact, we should be happier the bigger it is,because it shows that everyone else in the chain has been paid first and that the company has still succeeded in its ambition to transform time and resources into something we value.
Billionaires aren’t policy failures, but clear indications of (distributed) value created: jobs and incomes, improved goods and services, and a better standard of living. “Capitalism,” said the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in a Mont Pelerin lecture in 1958, “is not simply mass production, but mass production tosatisfy the needs of the masses.”
But the rich don’t pay their fair share, you might say. On the contrary, any serious investigation reveals that they pay everyone’s share. Some one-fifth of federal tax revenue already comes directly from the incomes of the richest one million American households. The incomes of the highest-earning 20 percent of households more or less bankroll the federal government. he Congressional Budget Office in its “The Distribution of Household Income” report notes:
High-income households generally pay a larger share of federal taxes. In 2020, for example, households in the highest income quintile received about 56 percent of all income and paid 81 percent of federal taxes.
I learned from Pappy, don’t hate the rich, hang out with them.
That KY horse farm owner official was an absolute perfect 10 goddess beautiful and what a party animal!
Better bring your strong liver and they had extra big ass teevee screen back in the 1990s.
Also they can afford to pack up and leave gibsmedat grabby areas and relocate to friendlier climes.
The rich live on a small percentage of what they are generating. Most of the wealth is constantly on the move (not in a secret hiding place where the poor can’t get it) paying workers, suppliers, hiring people to design and build and maintain their buildings. Distribute that to the poor who have no idea how to handle money and they will burn through what they receive in a binge weekend, and have no job on Monday. When the poor realize that they have something left over at the end of the month they opt for more beer and going to the game.
The richer the rich became in America the richer the poor became. Ask any of them if they want to trade places with the poor in Bangladesh or Guinea, when they realize how far down they would trade they wouldn’t do it, but they wouldn’t offer those people their comparative riches to lift them up. Playing the poor against the rich is a political game to acquire more power, not to even anything out.