I'm not sharing this for the meme itself, but for the fact check, because the fact check is ridiculous.
It's from a few years back, but when it was made, according to the fact checkers... it would fund the federal government for, not eight months... but over eight months and closer to nine months. Like... wow, thanks for that meaningless correction. Glad you're here to set the record straight on that.
And, of course, if they announced a one time wealth tax at 100%, 100% of billionaires would leave the country before it took effect. If there was a 50% one time wealth tax, 100% of billionaires would leave before it took effect. There is a limit high enough where the rich just leaves... we saw it in France and other nations that tried to jack up rates on the rich high and quick.
The obvious implication of the meme is that people who propose the federal government doing whatever they want it to do and saying it could be funded if billionaires just paid their "fair share" however they define it are not mathing well. I guess a good faith counterargument implied by Antony here says nobody is advocating a wealth tax, and "the rich" includes more than just billionaires, but we're way past the point of taxing our way out of this without addressing spending.
Adding zero programs at all, we're running deficits of about 2 trillion dollars a year (for the pedantic fact checkers maybe it's 1.9 trillion). The interest on the current debt alone is surpassing all military spending at a trillion on it's own. We're in debt 35 trillion, with a debt to GDP ratio well over a hundred percent by this point. Hell... It's over 120%. Debt per taxpayer is about $270,000, and even debt per citizen is over a hundred thousand. Every year that nothing is done, the problem gets larger given how entitlements are set up. We're years past the COVID crisis being over, but we're not even considering going back to pre-COVID spending, much less anything even approaching a balanced budget.
And the two major candidates for President are tripping over themselves to announce different types of new tax cuts and increasing the child tax credit by thousands without a care in the world. Maybe these proposals are positive, maybe they're not, but they're not serious. At least, they do nothing to address the immediate crisis, which is fully ignored by major parties in denial or too afraid to even bring up because they don't wanna terrify voters with the truth. Libertarians love the mantra that "taxation is theft", but what really matters here is spending. All government spending without exception is funded by taxation, even if that taxation comes in the form of inflation by expanding the money supply or whatever.
Tax cuts without spending cuts just shifts the burden around, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If the TEA party wanted to be serious, they'd have rebranded themselves as the SEA party.
Both the Republicans and Democrats of 2024 are left wing extremists on economics by the standard of, say... the nineties. Under Bill Clinton, these numbers would have been considered radical by the Democrats and probably even the Greens, both of which would have denied it would ever get this bad without the system collapsing.
Saying everything on the wishlist could be had if we just taxed the rich more is the left wing equivalent of Trump pretending that it can all be paid for with tariffs.