If you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.

Once we did that we'd have a lot less personal influence over that spending budget, at least.

But focusing on current assets and not accumulation of wealth is misleading. You'd also have to allocate the ongoing wealth accumulation to get a better sense of things.

If you cured 100% of all cancer it would only reduce US deaths by 20%. Clearly we should conclude that cancer isn't a problem and isn't worth curing, and also that heart disease and unintentional injuries and so on are also not problems and also not worth trying to fix.

GP didn't say it's not a problem and not worth fixing. They're claiming this is not a good fix.

They invented a dumb fix and complained that it wasn't good. Or, since we're being artistic in this thread: pulled a straw man out of their ass and complained that it smelled foul.

I did the same with cancer/mortality to demonstrate the same trick in a setting where its flaws were more obvious. It's true that I said the quiet part out loud in a way that the post I was mocking did not, but the quiet part is especially important to debunk so I make no apology for doing so.

It's not really a strawman.

Total net worth of all US billionaires is about $8 trillion.

2025 budget for the US federal government is about $7 trillion.

So if you seize the entire net worth of US billionaires, you get a one time funding of the US federal government for about 14 months.

You could make 900 people go from billionaires to high net worth individuals and nearly fund the exorbitant spending of the US government that directly supports 330 million people for a year.

I think you might be overselling how good that is.

I don't think you understand how taxation works.

ok, but how about if we stop funding ICE?

While ICE is the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the entire country now, their budget is still really just a drop in the bucket, and wouldn't make a meaningful difference in the fiscal picture. In fact, you could not only defund ICE, but the entire US armed forces, and that still wouldn't even eliminate the deficit - we'd still need to borrow over a trillion dollars a year.

That said, I'm all for the peaceful, lawful, orderly dissolution of as many federal government agencies as we can agree on dissolving. My preference would be "all of them", but I have no problem starting with ICE and revisiting the rest later :)

Trump has added 2 trillion (unilaterally and illegally) to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.

The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast