But a wealth tax would solve everything!

Let's take their thinking to the logical extreme.

If you were to place a 100% wealth tax on every billionaire in the country, you would raise $4.56 trillion.

Once.

This is leaving aside the fact that such a large and sudden liquidation of assets would crash the market immediately as billionaires have their wealth tied up in assets from stocks to bonds to real estate to art, and not swimming pools of cash, as Elizabeth Warren might imagine.

Next, let's consider that the federal government spent $6.82 trillion in 2021.

$4.56 trillion divided by $6.82 trillion gets you 0.6686. Multiply 0.6866 by the number of months in a year and you find that the combined wealth of every billionaire in the country wouldn't be enough to feed the gaping maw of the federal government through Labor Day.

But wait, you argue, 2021 was an unusual year!!!

Maybe not as unusual as we'd all like to think.

The current proposed federal budget for 2022 is $6.01 trillion.

That means doing the same math still doesn't even get you to the World Series.

For a little extra fun, let's add in all government spending, including state and local.

That's about $9 trillion in total spending.

That means we have just enough billionaires to fund every level of government just in time for the fourth of July!

What about the millionaires? Well, using some very rough numbers, I get about $63 trillion in total wealth, meaning if you confiscated all of their wealth, you could fund the federal government for maybe 10 years and all levels of government for seven.

I mean, you wouldn't have an economy anymore and would be facing nothing but empty shelves, but I guess we're getting used to that now.

But hey, we're sticking it to the rich, right? They deserve it! After all, the average millionaire in this country is only wealthy because he, um, earned it?

Only about 20% of Americans inherit their riches.

The rest of them (80%) are self-made, first-generation millionaires. Most millionaires have to work for the money and don't get rich once a relative dies, according to "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy" by Thomas J Stanley.

In fact, on average, millionaires work for 28 years.

The people in the study became millionaires by consistently saving over time. In fact, they worked, saved and invested for an average of 28 years before hitting the million-dollar mark, and most of them reached that milestone at age 49.

Why then are so many politicians and other elites so focused on seizing the wealth of people who are more successful than themselves?

When you know that you have little to offer the world – so little in fact that your major accomplishment, trumpeted in your Twitter bio, is "organizer" (and we're not even talking about something useful like closets) – you are consumed with envy.

When you know, deep down inside that you are of mediocre intellect and live in constant fear that you will be exposed for the fraud you are, you are consumed with envy.

When your entire life has been one long grift, starting with claiming native American heritage in order to secure a position you could not possibly get solely on merit, you are consumed with envy.

And when you are an avowed socialist, and need to distract people from that fact that you yourself are somehow a millionaire despite a lifetime in "public service," you are consumed with envy.

How consumed with envy?

So consumed with envy that even though you are a successful correspondent with a major newspaper and card-carrying member of the elite, you somehow still can't help but hate read Vogue so you can take cheap shots at someone's wedding.

Oh, and who happened by to help officiate that lavish wedding that is a perfect example of why we need a wealth tax?

They can't earn it themselves, so they use their power and influence to take their money and their elite status.

Rather than penalizing the most successful among us – the people who through their extraordinary talent, hard work, and sacrifice, create jobs, opportunities, unimaginable progress, and have driven the greatest wealth-generating machine in the history of mankind – we instead turn our gaze towards the behemoth right in front of us: The ultimate profligate, wasteful, amoral fat cat.

The one entity that luxuriates in the wealth seized from others, building monuments to itself and then patting itself on the back for its generosity with other people's money.

Let's place a wealth tax on the federal government and take our money back.