this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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If everyone in the US donated 100,000 that would raise 34.2 Trillion.
That’s a nice dent.
If we took all of the wealth from the top 10 billionaires it would equal about 2.5 Trillion.
The combined wealth of the 1%, however, is about 52 trillion.
So, we could pay off most of the national debt by instantly burdening everyone with a one time $100,000 tax bill. If you can’t afford it you have to make loan payments on it.
OR we could confiscate all of the wealth of the top 1%, pay off the debt, and have plenty left over to let the 1% keep some wealth and maybe fund some other things.
None of these options are practical obviously, but it does imply that the top 1% could easily afford wealth taxes of some kind and it would help pay down the national debt and that the non 1% could not do anything other than take on fractional ownership of the debt directly.
This shows one group can afford it, another group definitely cannot.
We probably need to start electing people exclusively from the bottom 99% of wealth holders, or better yet the bottom 50%. Ideally it should be illegal to be allowed to run the government if your net worth or the net worth of your family puts you at all in the top percentiles of wealth.
You're talking about taking money from the same people who own the debt to pay themselves off.
Might as well just cancel the debt. It's the same result with less steps.
It actually wouldn't be that big of a deal to take the top 1%'s money.
They got it through merit: hard work, discipline, intelligence, etc.
They'd just make it back pretty quick, right?
Paying it off is only half the battle. If we don’t answer the question how did we get here?, we’re doomed to fall right back into this hole. Fact is, the government simply burns through money like it’s going out of style and until we elect representatives that use our money more responsibly, we’ll keep piling on more debt.
You can only rack up so much of it before foreign holders of US bonds start liquidating their positions or buying less of it. Once that starts happening en masse, all the cards will fall and it will be ugly.
Why do you think they passed Citizens United? Now that political spending is free speech and corporations are people, elections are expensive enough that the winners are mainly the rich or those propped up by them.
And foreign interests can just create as much chaos as they pay for.
As long as the apple is golden, it spends
We don’t even need to pay off the whole thing, just need to get it back down to a reasonable level. Most countries carry a good amount of debt.
The majority is domestically held anyway.