Tax the Rich, Kill the Host.

0:00This March 9th, 2026 episode of views on the news from the couch addresses the idea that we can solve our country's financial problems by screwing billionaires. I mean why not? Taking money from billionaires can be as popular as killing ants at a picnic, and while an ant-free picnic is great, we're taking all the billionaires money really being the common person's best interest. Let's review a few facts to help us bait this financial cake. Our federal government spends about $7 trillion a year. We take a bit more than $5.2 trillion in a year in revenue, a $2 trillion shortfall. No way to run a household budget, but oh well. The federal government has over $35 trillion of accumulated debt, and that does not take into account unfunded liabilities. The popular solutions range from fantasy to economic suicide.

1:03In today's podcast, we will walk through a few of those fantasies. Talk about the one country that is at least honest about the trade-offs, and then end with what I think is the actual grown-up conversation we ought to be having. One popular idea from the extremes is, let's just tax the rich. You've heard this one. We'll fix our deficit by taxing the billionaires and make the rich pay their fair share. Fair is a loaded word. We can argue whether or not they pay their fair share, but let's at least acknowledge that they pay a disproportionate share in taxes. For example, the top 1% of households in terms of income earn about 19% of all income and pay close to 40% of all federal income taxes. Many folks do not know the facts or don't care, and just want billionaires to pay more. Okay, let's go all in. Let's not just tax their income, let's take it all.

2:06What if we take every dollar of wealth from every billionaire in America, not a higher rate, not a new surcharge, literally confiscate all of their wealth? Every share, every building, every yacht, all of it? When you add it up, the total pile of billionaire wealth is roughly in the high single-digit trillions. Call it $7 or $8 trillion. Do we use it to fund the current budget or buy down the debt? Federal spending in a year is also around $7 trillion. We could confiscate all the wealth of U.S. billionaires and fund the government for one year. Or we could buy down the debt from the high 30 trillions to the low 30 trillions. Still running an annual deficit, and still have a large debt but no more billionaires. Maybe we can turn our sites lower to folks worth over a hundred million a year. That's a lot of money and nobody needs that much. Let's go after them too.

3:07Take all the wealth of any one worth between a hundred million and one billion. That's another couple of trillion dollars give or take. Maybe we've bought ourselves a year and a half of spending so far, total, or bought down a bit more of the federal debt. But once again, one time and then it's gone, still not enough. Let's really lean into the class war fantasy. Ten to a hundred million in total wealth is still rich, right? They are roughly 900,000 Americans in that man. If you ballpark the totals and they've got something like load of mid-teens of trillions of dollars between them. So now we seize all of that too. Ten million, twenty million, eighty million gone. Add it all together from ten millionaires all the way up through billionaires and you're in the rough neighborhood of the mid-twenties and trillions of dollars of wealth. Twenty plus trillion, maybe twenty five. Sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But our debt pile is in the mid-thirties and trillions.

4:10Even after this full communist confiscate every rich person's asset scenario, you still cannot fully pay off the debt. There's still roughly ten trillion dollars hanging out there and you haven't paid for next year's spending or the year after that or Social Security or Medicare or anything else going forward. And what have you done to get that far? You've wiped out the people who own the factories, the buildings, the fleets, the software companies, the farms, the supply chains. You've destroyed the capital base that hires workers, funds R&D and builds anything new. We weren't clever parasites. We were really bad parasites because we killed the host. If we ever went down this road, the proponents of the stupid proposal would act surprised that there is nothing left to feed on. And we've actually seen broad versions of just take the rich people's stuff and fix everything before. Russia after 1917, China under Mao, Cuba after Castro.

5:14They didn't get a worker's paradise. They got economic collapse, shortages, and a new elite living large while everyone else stood in line. Hey, I'm for the rich paying more taxes than the poor. In fact, while I'm not a tax the wealth proponent, I do believe we need to find a way to make unrealized capital gains taxable. Maybe after a number of years forced the wealthy to realize the gains. Sell the other underlying assets to others or to themselves. And at the very least, not have the cost basis on unrealized capital gains, be it current levels when a rich person dies so their heirs avoid capital gains tax. Let's now explore how adults handle a high government spending high tax scenario, but looking at Sweden. I say this as someone who doesn't want their system, but I expect that they are adults about it. Sweden has high taxes and high social benefits.

6:17Healthcare, college, parental leave, all the classic Nordic package. But here's the key. They do not run that system on tax the rich and everyone else gets a free ride. In Sweden, almost everyone pays a lot. A typical Swedish worker pays a municipal income tax of about 30% on labor income once they are passed a relatively small basic deduction, only a few thousand US dollars a year. On top of that, once you get above about 60,000 US dollars in annual income, they owe an additional 20% tax of the Swedish national government. So that upper middle class engineer or nurse or mid-level managers facing something like a 50% plus marginal income tax on the next corona they earn. And it doesn't stop there. Swedish employers pay a hefty social security type charge on top of wages, roughly 30% of the salary cost, over time that comes out of what businesses can afford to pay their

7:20workers effectively lowering wages. Then you layer on a value added tax and national sales tax of about 25% on most goods and services. In Sweden when you buy things, when you earn income, when your employer writes your check, the government is taking a big bite at every stage, not just from billionaires, but not just from people with private jets, from the teachers, the plumber, the nurse, the engineer. Compare that to the US. A high earner here faces a top federal income tax rate of 37%. If they live in a high tax state, California, New York, New Jersey, they might be in the high 40s or low 50s once you add state income tax. That's already in the same ballpark as the Swedish top marginal rate. Capital gains are top long term capital gains rate is 20%. Plus a 3.8% sur tax for higher earners.

8:21Swedish tax is many capital gains at around 30%. Higher, yes, but not some kind of Tunish 90%. And here's a twist a lot of people don't know. Sweden doesn't even have an inheritance tax anymore. They abolished their inheritance and gift tax years ago. Meanwhile the US still has an estate tax at the federal level, even with a big exemption. The real difference between the US and Swedish taxing systems is where the pain starts and how broadly it's applied. In Sweden, the hammer comes down early and often. The guy making the equivalent of $80,000 a year is carrying a very heavy load. Income taxes, payroll taxes through his employer and a big sales tax when he spends his paycheck. Swedes basically say, we all pay a lot more in return, we will get a lot more. We understand the deal and they accept it. They don't pretend the entire system is secretly funded by five rich guys in Stockholm while

9:23everyone else gets Scandinavian goodies at American tax rates. They are adults. Americans on the other hand want Swedish style benefits with US style broad tax rates and a slogan make the rich pay their fair share. We are children. If you want Swedish benefits, you need Swedish level taxes on the broad middle, not just on billionaires, on you. Once you strip away the bumper stickers, here are the real choices, option A. Go Swedish or something like it. Big universal benefits, strong safety net, lots of services, but very high, broad based taxes. The middle class and upper middle class pay a lot more through income tax, payroll tax and some form of national consumption tax. Or option B, stand American. More modest, broad taxation, more limited benefits, still a big government by global standards but not the fully loaded Scandinavian model.

10:25That requires actually prioritizing and saying no to some things. Option C, fantasy land. Number 10, we can run a Swedish level welfare state by just taxing the rich. Pretend billionaires are an exhaustible ATM and ignore what happens when the basic arithmetic and the real economy disagree. Right now a lot of our politics lives in option C. But this next point is what really pisses me off. All of us should want to fight waste, fraud and abuse. Not just slogan it but really go after it. To do that, we as a group have to work at it, audit, hold people accountable like doge tried to do. The waste hunting effort led by Elon Musk that should have been popular, but not so much because many people have profited from the ways fraud and abuse. And waste fraud and abuse is not a line item in the budget. It is wrought and decay spread throughout the system that has to be found and eliminated.

11:28Quick questions. Why the hell was in everyone in favor of doge? I don't mean the skimmers, but the rest of us. If you're going to spend trillions of dollars a year, it makes a huge difference whether you spend it like adults or like drunken sailors on shoreleaf. Every dollar that doesn't get lit on fire by fraud, bad procurement, corporate welfare or bureaucratic inertia is a dollar that does not have to be raised in higher taxes or borrowed from your kids and grandkids. If you're a big government person, you should be first in line to demand serious crackdowns on waste fraud and abuse. That's how you protect the programs you care about from backlash. If you're a small government person like me, you should also be first in line because the more money the gets burned, the easier it is for politicians to come back and say, sorry, we need new revenue. If we're going to spend crazy amounts of money, we should at least spend less because we do it wisely, not more because we spend it like we've lost our mind.

12:33Where does that leave us? We've walked through the confiscation fantasy, take everything from billionaires, everything from people over a hundred million, everything from people over ten million. You still don't fully fix the debt and you've blown up the economy that generates future tax revenue. You looked at Sweden, high taxes, high benefits, and a population that understands they themselves are paying for it, not just some cartoon rich villain. We admitted that waste fraud and abuse isn't a magic wand, but it's absolutely something we should be serious about if we care at all about the bill we're handing to the next generation. Here's where I land. We can all disagree on the right amount of taxation and spending. You might want a bigger state, I might want a smaller one. That's a legitimate debate. But whatever your number is, taxes and spending have to be related by reality, not by slogans. We can't all be that creepy friend at dinner who forgets his wallet or who orders the

13:36flame in y'all and the lobster when he knows we're splitting the check. As citizens, we are the people at the table. If we want the benefits, we have to pay our fair share, not just point at some other group and pretend they'll cover the whole tab forever. And we ought to be adults about the other half of the equation too. We should support real efforts to eliminate waste fraud and abuse, even when it touches programs we personally like. Then once we've admitted that nothing is free and that incompetence is expensive, we can have the real bit argument how big should government be, what should it actually do, what do we as grownups want to pay for and are willing to pay for it ourselves? That's the adult conversation. And those are my views on the news from the couch. Be safe, we're sunscreen.