One thing I was thinking about recently: whenever I ask people how we are going to pay for their new social program, they always say we will just tax the billionaires, and then look at me bewildered when I say "and how is that gonna fund it long term?"

I'm not entirely against government social programs as is; they can be useful under the right circumstances. My issue comes is that people can never tell you how we are going to consistently fund it in a reasonable way.

"Taxing billionaires" is not going to long term give you enough money to continually run things forever. Okay, let's say we put a 30 percent wealth tax on billionaires.

That's 2.43 in profits for that wealth tax, assuming no capital flight, asset depreciation, etc., and that's for that one year, each year of kept doing that 30 percent, even assuming no depreciation, it'll shrink each year. I've attached a graph to show this.

Now with that 2 trillion, let's look at current social programs, this wealth tax will fund:

Social security... Yeah that's about it, and a little bit of Medicare.

So we've funded social security for 1 year, and we will have less and less each year.

So no, this is not a consistent way of getting revenue for social programs.

sad