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Trump admin considering giving $10,000 to each person in Greenland to annex the island
(www.latintimes.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:
Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.
US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.
Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can't find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we'll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it's all taxed (which it isn't - most isn't considered income). That's 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn't collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.
Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone's income below 1.65M/yr.
Don't get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn't necessary to fund UBI.