Between them, America’s five richest men — Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page — have a combined wealth estimated by Forbes Fortune 400 at $1.377 trillion, but confiscating their every penny would provide only enough money to keep the federal government operating for two months.

Even taxing 100% of the wealth of every American earning more than $660,000 would only keep the federal government functioning a little more than four months, according to calculations by Debbie Jennings, senior policy manager for the National Taxpayers Union (NTU).

Jennings’s calculations are included in her February 10 analysis entitled, “Taxing the Rich Won’t Pay for Government Spending.”

Her analysis comes as Democratic Socialists, including New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) and New York Repp. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, propose heavy increases in federal levies on high income individuals.

Mamdani supports a 51% increase in the levy on New York City’s wealthiest taxpayers, while Ocasio-Cortez advocates an “expeditious” 70% tax rate on top earners and Sanders advocates a 100% rate on all income exceeding $999 million.

Jennings argues in her analysis that her calculations make it clear such “tax the rich” proposals, even when taken to the logical extreme, pale by comparison to the enormity of federal spending and deficits.

“Unsurprisingly, the idea works better as a campaign speech than a revenue generator. This wishful thinking about how much additional revenue could be raised in the name of making the wealthy pay their ‘fair share’ falls short of fiscal reality: Federal spending already far exceeds revenues, the tax code is highly progressive, and new research shows that higher taxes would not generate as much as advocates claim and will harm economic growth,” Jennings writes.

“In Fiscal Year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion and collected $5.235 trillion in tax revenue, resulting in a budget deficit of $1.775 trillion. Unsustainable deficits are an increasingly common feature of our federal budget, with the annual deficit surpassing $2 trillion in 2021 following the passage of costly partisan subsidies cloaked as pandemic relief,” Jennings continued.

“On average, this means that the federal government spent about $19.2 billion per day. At this level of spending, raising the average federal tax rate on the top 1% from its current level of 26.09% to 30% would fund the government for only 6 additional days. Even setting aside all the other practical and economic consequences of doing so, seizing the entire income of the top 1% by taxing them at an average federal rate of 100% would not even fund the government for half a year — only raising enough revenue to fund 127 days of government spending,” she said.

The NTU policy analyst also pointed to a recent analysis by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that concluded none of the various approaches to taxing the richest individuals can produce enough additional revenue to put much of a dent in the federal government’s colossal annual deficits and the exploding national debt that approaches $40 trillion.

Also earlier this year during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a number of famously wealthy individuals signed onto a letter entitled “Time to Win” in which they asked world leaders to “tax the super-rich.” The letter claimed such action is necessary because “a handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies, taken over our governments, gagged the freedom of our media, placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation, deepened poverty and social exclusion, and accelerated the breakdown of our planet.”

Among the signers were actor Mark Ruffalo and Disney heiress Abigail Disney. Organizers of the letter campaign claim more than 400 wealthy individuals from 24 countries signed the letter. Not among the signers are Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Page.