The Fallacy of #TaxtheRich

Recently, there was a meme going around facebook sponsored by some hashtag Tax the Rich. In it the individual postulated that Jeff Bezos of Amazon had a $185 billion fortune and if we just took enough to pay each person on earth a billion dollars, everyone would be a billionaire and Jeff would still have $144 billion left. At the bottom it said “Can't find a problem with this logic!”

How about a problem with his math? 185 billion divided by 7.5 billion is 24.6. I don't think $24 is going to make anyone's life much different. While I hate Bezos' politics and some of his partisan business practices, he came up with a great idea, built a huge business, made a lot of other people wealthy, and provided over a million jobs. He did it starting in his garage. That is how wealth is created.

We think Jeff Bezos has a lot of money, that winning a million dollars in the lottery is a lot of money. If the government took all of Jeff Bezos' money and divided it among every American each one of us would get $528. Of course Jeff would be on the street and none of us would get all $528 dollars. The bureaucracy would eat most of it. Let's look at it another way. Under Trump the United States Federal Government spent $8.5 million dollars every minute! So if the government confiscated all of Jeff Bezos' fortune, it would burn through it in fifteen days. Then what? Can't get any more money from Jeff, it took twenty-five years to make Amazon what it is. Just go to the next billionaire? If you took all the money from all the U.S. billionaires you could almost take care of Trump's $4.5 trillion budget for one year. But what about next year? All the billionaires are gone and it will take them decades to build that wealth again. So you go to the millionaires? When those are gone, then what?

The “tax the rich” crowd believe that wealth is created by government. It is not. The money the government spends is gone. It is not invested, it does not build things that create wealth. It wastes, it destroys. Biden left almost $100 billion dollars worth of military equipment in Afghanistan for terrorists. $100 billion gone. How many of us worked how many hours to make enough tax money to buy that much stuff? Over $600 from each working American. Wasted. You may as well taken one of your paychecks and set it on fire. This is just the latest, and most egregious, example of waste. So once it steals all the money form all the people who have earned it and saved it, then what? Where is the $8.5 million dollars for the next minute going to come from? And the minute after that? And this is all based on Trump's spending. Biden's wasting three times that much.

The tax the rich crowd bases its idea on a false assumption-government is a better steward of a nation's wealth that its individual citizens. If the purpose of a nation is to improve the lives of its citizens then you only need to compare the nearest public housing project to the lives of the middle managers in Amazon to see if those living off money stolen by the government live better than those who are creating value in spite of government. If the objective is to improve the standard of living of everyone, stealing more from the successful is not going to accomplish that goal. You cannot lift the poor by stealing everything from the rich. But the history of the United States, its great contribution to the history of the world, is to show that the most men and women reach the highest standard of living with a minimum of government theft and control. We are close to losing it completely but history will testify to the truth.