Top 5%? There aren’t enough of them. And the top 5% start at ~$150k per household. Not exactly “rich”.

To fund it, you’d probably have to tax the top 50% at a much higher rate.

Total US income is about 9,200T. Top 5% represent about 30% of all income or 3,000T.

Pay every household $24,000 per year is about 3,000T total.

So yeah, you could tax the top 5% at 100% and just barely pay for it.

This seems to be the case in Scandinavia with broad basic health care. In at least one country median earners pay 60% tax IIRC. https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/Progressivity%20...

And that extends to far lower incomes than in the US.

The 40% bracket in the UK starts at ~$60k USD (50k GBP). In the US you’d be in a 22% bracket up to $84k.

Not picking on the UK, just an example.

The more you tax them, the less they work and save, and the more they make, find, and exploit loopholes and shelters. Top tax rates have been as high as 90% (during the Eisenhower administration) and revenue has never significantly changed as a function of GDP.

So what’s the exact math on this? About 209 million adults in the US times 12k a year, so $2.5 trillion. The current tax revenues look like it’s about $3.3 trillion per year.

I don’t think there’s enough people in the top 5% to get the amount needed without literally taxing them into oblivion. We’d need corporate taxes to pull this off, and those bastards cleverly hang out in tax havens, and I wonder how much more clever they’d be willing to get once we tax them more.

I’d love for it work.