With the rich getting richer, it’s time to ask if we should be preparing menus so we can eat them.
This has been a disappointing exercise in the past. Turns out they didn’t have enough money.
The latest figures, however, tell us things have changed. The truly rich may now have enough wealth that, well, we might consider some menus.
Do the rich have enough capital to feed our government?
Fifteen years ago, they didn’t. I demonstrated this back in 2010. You can read the column here: https://scottburns.com/is-it-time-to-eat-the-rich/
Back then Bill Gates topped the Forbes 400 list at $54 billion. He was followed by Warren Buffett ($45 billion) and Larry Ellison ($27 billion). That’s an impressive total of $126 billion.
Unfortunately, the federal deficit back then was $1,471 billion. That’s about $118 billion a month. So if the Treasury department picked up the three wealthiest guys in the world and removed them to an unspecified place, our government would just squeak through a single month!
Working my way through the Forbes list member by member, I found that the Treasury would have gobbled up the entire 400 and their fortunes in only nine months. It would have cooked the last 100 members in a single week at the end of June.
Clearly, taking wealth wasn’t the answer.
But that was then…
This year’s Forbes 400 list shows a gigantic increase in wealth since 2010. Elon Musk tops the list with $428 billion. He is followed by Larry Ellison with $276 billion and Mark Zuckerberg at $253 billion. Between them, they have $957 billion, a stunning 7.6 times the wealth of the top three just 15 years ago. That’s closer (but no after-dinner cigar) to covering the $1,877.6 billion deficit of fiscal 2025!
Forbes also produces an annual list of the total wealth of the top 20 wealth holders. This year their total is $3 trillion. That’s 60 percent more than the $1,877.6 billion federal deficit. Enough to cover the deficit for over 18 months!
And that leaves 380 Forbes list members for another time.
But what about income?
A quaint, but more humane, notion is to require that our top earners share more of their income. Historically, they’re generally not as excited by this notion as the non-rich are. But I’m sure they would agree that it is superior to eating them.
The most recent income-related figures from the IRS are for 2022. Those figures show that the biggest earners have gained a higher percentage of all income since 2010. As a result, the entire perspective on both financing the deficit and how much it would strain top income earners changes.
The top 1 percent had a minimum income of $663,164. They made a bit over $3.3 trillion, or 22.44 percent of all adjusted gross income. They paid at an average tax rate of 26.09 percent. This provided a whopping 40.43 percent of all taxes paid, a clear indication that our biggest earners are heavy duty taxpayers.
Unfortunately, raising their tax rate to cover the $1.4 trillion deficit for 2022 would have required raising their average tax rate an additional 42 percent to a total rate of about 68 percent.
Reach down to the top 5 percent, a minimum income level of $261,991, and they enjoyed about $5.6 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.3 trillion in taxes at an average rate of 23.07 percent. They paid a whopping 61 percent of all income taxes. Having them pay enough additional taxes to cover the $1.4 trillion deficit would add another 25 percent to their average tax rate. The total would be about 48 percent of income.
Even with the rise in stock prices since 2022, the 48 percent average tax rate wouldn’t decline much.
That leaves us with a problem.
Until recently, funding the federal government was a bipartisan problem regularly solved by tweaks, expert obfuscation and carefully constructed lies. No more. Financing our government is now a structural problem – something that requires major policy changes. It would not be safe to hold our breath as we await those changes.
Can we at least look in some area?
Yes. The most likely candidate for massive change is Healthcare. At 16.7 percent of GDP, U.S. health care costs far more than comparable industrial nations (11.0 percent) while delivering lower life expectancy.
Until then, stay alive.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, 11/14/2010: https://scottburns.com/is-it-time-to-eat-the-rich/
Scott Burns, 8/17/2019: https://scottburns.com/is-it-time-to-eat-the-rich-2/
Scott Burns, 9/1/2019: https://scottburns.com/eat-the-rich-and-take-their-money-continued/
Sources and References:
The Forbes 400, 2025: https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
Forbes 400 article with graphic of Net Worth of the top 20 of the 400: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2025/09/09/the-2025-forbes-400-list-of-wealthiest-americans-facts-and-figures/
IRS tax spreadsheets. Table 4.1: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-time-series-statistical-tables
Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker: Emma Wager, Matt McGough, Shameek Rakshit, and Cynthia Cox, “How does health spending in the U.S. compare to other countries?” (April 9, 2025): https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#GDP%20per%20capita%20and%20health%20consumption%20spending%20per%20capita,%20U.S.%20dollars,%202023%20(current%20prices%20and%20PPP%20adjusted)%C2%A0
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Photo: Scott Burns, July, 2024: A food shop along the Camino de Santiago
(c) Scott Burns, 2025