Everyone who has heard a Democratic politician speak in the last decade has heard the mantra, “We can balance the budget (or fund a pet new social program) if we just make the billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.”

So let’s see what it would look like. Let’s balance the budget―not even taking the extreme of creating and paying for any new social programs―with higher taxes on billionaires. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline budget predicts a deficit of nearly $1.851 trillion in fiscal year 2026 (which begins October 1, 2025)―without President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB). Add in the BBB and the CBO says the deficit would increase by nearly $485 billion, bringing the total to $2.335 trillion. That’s about $17,600 on the national credit card for every one of the 132 million households in America…in one year.

And it’s probably a low estimate. The Tax Foundation puts the increase in the deficit from the BBB a little higher than the CBO, at $542.8 billion with its conventional analysis, which would bring the fiscal 2026 deficit up to about $2.4 trillion. The CBO has been criticized both for its recent overly optimistic projections of low deficits in the past two years as well as its rosy predictions of deficit reduction under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that didn’t materialize.

The reality is that some more income could be extracted through the income tax method without throttling production. The peak of the Laffer Curve in U.S. income taxes is probably somewhere near the 50% range (the current top rate is just shy of 40%); if income taxes are raised higher than that, people start hiding or expatriating their incomes. The percentage of all income taxes paid by the top 0.1 percent of earners actually increased as the nominal tax rates on the rich fell after the 1950s according to left-wing academics Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, even as the top income tax rate has fluctuated from highs of 90% in the 1950s to lows of 28% in the 1980s. …

The irony here is not that Democratic politicians will not stop their (admittedly failing) electoral campaign slogans about taxing the rich if they were shown the math on this, a level of math that even a second grader could understand. They know good-and-well the math in their campaign promises doesn’t add up. They know it very well. They’re not stupid; they’re evil. But these slogans get them votes from all the people who don’t do second grade-level math.

America is governed by children, and by children, I mean the voters. They willingly elect congressmen who openly plan for endless deficits and an ever-increasing debt burden without any thought past the next election. Like a father behind on payments on the family home, facing imminent bank foreclosure, congressmen of both parties are like that irresponsible father who refuses to give up the $500/month dance lessons for his daughter and the $7,000 annual vacation in Florida and charges them up on the near-maxxed out credit card for the sake of keeping up outward appearances of solvency and normalcy just a few weeks longer.

But the financial reckoning of a sovereign national debt crisis is coming, and it’s coming good and hard. Even to the voters who don’t do math.