5under3 | March 6, 2020 at 11:52 am (at LI)
All the billionaires in the US are only worth in the neighborhood of $3 trillion. If we confiscated every penny of their collective wealth, that would be less than $10,000 per person in the US, less than one year of current annual federal spending and less then 15% of the national debt.

Bill’s post is from 2011, so that is the data Iowahawk used to run the numbers, but I’m sure the relative ratios of private wealth and government spending haven’t changed much.

Even Elon Musk’s wealth wouldn’t last the government spendthrifts and embezzlers, and the fraudsters, more than a few months today.

I don’t recall seeing Iowahawk’s piece, but it appears to have led to this old post from Bill Whittle’s “Firewall” podcast series.

This is a new link from his archive; an old one I used in a long-ago comment is now dead. However, this link has only the “blurb” and not the video, which was fascinating, and I hope it is eventually reinstated.

https://billwhittle2.com/eat-the-rich/
“Is America really broke? Michael Moore (and others) tells us that there are oceans of cash being hoarded by the wealthy. But Iowahawk (iowahawk.typepad.com) did a little addition, and armed with these statistics Bill and the ‘Hawk blow a hole in the “hoarding” lie big enough to fit a documentary filmmaker through.”

Found the video on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/youtube-ows-BillWhittleontheEatTheRichMentality-6npXHS91U80

Florida’s been done, in terms of suggested locations. Problem is, most folks in the north or midwest go there in the winter. Few go to Florida for the August breezes. But if you live there, you get them for free.

Been in and traveled through the mid South. Things can be pretty mild. A number of places got started with the monied needed a retreat from the lowlands/coastal southern summers…and yellow fever season. You don’t have to go far to find some hills and with altitude comes mild seasons.

Spent some time in Banner Elk, NC. It’s just short of 4000 feet. Yesterday, it was 44 degrees, compared to my home in Michigan which was at 24. In the summer there are days when we are warmer.

The towns, above a modest minimum, are pleasant. The landscape is always interesting. Larger towns are not infrequent if you wan some version of the urban atmosphere.

And the prices are reasonable.

Not trying to sell any real estate. Still, if people leaving NYC or adjacent areas of collective warmth don’t make it out with their private bank vault, there are options.

Basically it worked like this. “Tax the rich”? Okay. What if the federal government confiscated *all* wealth above a certain threshold. Say $1 million. Just clean out the assets of every large company and corporation and millionaire.

It would fund the federal government for something like four months.

This is what lefties who cry “tax the rich” never understand or acknowledge. Taxing the rich does not work and is never enough. And what happens after you confiscate everything above a certain amount? And all those companies and corporations and millionaires have nothing left? What then?

But the one at 2:23am is devastating.