Take the inverse stance: take a country that taxes its citizens to death, like France or Belgium. How are they doing? Very badly.

France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die.

If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion.

So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year.

And that's it. 25% for a year.

Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years.

I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating.

Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]).

And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right?

How... Convenient?

Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies".

The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are.

I cannot understand that mindset.

I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got.

Good. For. Him.

I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed).

And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.

You should include other countries for reference. The US has approximately 390x that amount of debt (only 5 times the population) and the average person is economically much worse off than all the European countries you just mentioned.

We literally spend more government money per person on healthcare than France does while having less public healthcare, precisely because of the "help the rich" policies causing most of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.

Well said. People won’t like to hear it but it’s true. If you seized the wealth of every billionaire in the US you could fund the federal government for about a year. Of course most of it is not liquid so in reality much less. So when people talk about how we need to “tax the rich” and our problems will be solved I assume they're lacking in political knowledge. Or they just see it as a form of punishment for daring to accumulate so much wealth.