However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.
The point is that billionaire wealth is not that much compared to the government’s current spending, much less what you’d need to support large numbers of immigrants on welfare (as suggested by OP above).
The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.
I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.
rayiner|23 days ago
The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.
I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.