Matt Walsh says rich people are the “victims of the tax system”
Walsh: “Someone who makes 600k is getting robbed by the government. ... The government is just straight up stealing nearly half of the income of millions of American families, millions of American workers.”
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From the October 8, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): And did you notice something about the tax brackets? These rich people are not all billionaires. In fact, almost none of them are billionaires. There are only like 700 billionaires in the whole country. It — they're — billionaires are basically irrelevant. They barely exist. 700 in a country of 330 million people. You could confiscate all of their money, take all of it — you could put a tax rate of a hundred percent on billionaires, and it would fund the government for, like, a week or something. OK? I mean, the government spends, $16 billion dollars a day. OK? A day. So you could take, Elon Musk's entire net worth and reduce him to poverty — which I know the left would love to do that — it would fund the government for what? Two weeks? two weeks. So the billionaires don't matter. They don't really matter when it comes to — it's marginal. It — they're spending so much money and there are so few billionaires that it's a drop in the bucket.
These taxes on the rich are mostly screwing over people who are not billionaires. In fact, a huge number of these people are not even millionaires. OK. Again, the top tax rate, you're talking about $600,000 dollars for a single individual. These are not -- most -- so these aren't even millionaires. And while that's happening, these idiot liberals are pretending that actually somehow by some voodoo magic, public school teachers are paying more in taxes than people who have to fork over 40% of their income to the federal government.
And, you know, we went over this already, but higher-income people — by that I mean, and the IRS means more importantly, people who make 600k or more, not billionaires, not even close to billionaires — higher-income people pay for almost everything. They get the worst deal by a long shot. They get screwed the most by our current tax system, and it's not even close. OK? I know it's not it's like not a popular thing. It's not very populist to say that — to say, oh, you know, boo hoo. Someone who makes 600k is getting robbed by the government. But yeah, you know what? Yeah, boo hoo. It like — it's a bad thing. It is a bad thing. It's actually outrageous. The government is just straight up stealing nearly half of the income of millions of American families, millions of American workers who have worked extremely hard to get to where they are and they have families to take care of only to get ruthlessly punished for it. So yeah, they are the victims of the tax system. OK. I mean, they just are people who make, 40, 50, 60k, the average American income, they do pretty well when it comes to federal income taxes. They're getting screwed in a bunch of other ways. Everybody is. Every American is getting screwed by the system because we have an incompetent, corrupt, wasteful, government — government and federal bureaucracy that screws everybody over. No question about it, but, so we're all getting a raw deal. But my point is when it comes to the federal income tax system specifically, higher-income people have by far the most to complain about.