In responding to critical letters in the latest Commentary, Ira Stoll defends his previous work dissecting problems associated with Warren Buffett‘s version of the “tax the rich” schemes so popular among Obama administration supporters these days:
The government could confiscate the entire net worth—not just a year’s income, but the entire net worth—of nearly every billionaire in the country, according to Forbes, and it would have $1.5 trillion, assuming that none of them fled the country with their assets. That’s slightly more than 10 percent of our national debt, a little more than a year’s worth of just the deficit spending at the current levels, or less than half the annual cost of all the government’s spending. Even if one wanted to risk the confidence-destroying and incentive-destroying effects of such an assault on private property rights, the payoff wouldn’t really be that much. A year later, we’d still have a trillion-dollar annual deficit and $13 trillion in accumulated debt, but there wouldn’t be any billionaires left for us to argue about raising taxes on.
