If Only America Were as Wealthy as Liberals Think It Is

Every once in a while, some seemingly innocuous comment catches your attention, and as you start to think about it, you realize it’s like a single thread that will unravel a whole broken worldview if you pull on it long enough.

This Tweet from some rando on X did that for me:

First of all, I’m not trying to pick on this guy at all because what he’s saying there is a variation of something you commonly hear on the Left from the bottom to the top. Instead of him saying it, it could have just as easily been AOC, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders.

It’s basically a bit of commonly believed magical thinking on the Left, “We’re the wealthiest country in the world, so we can easily afford…” Followed by a bunch of meaningless drivel.

In this case, he’s saying that we could easily afford to give everyone shelter, but it could have been food, water, Internet, healthcare, cell phones, or free childcare. It could have also been a statement about how we could easily afford to give billions to nations overseas, wipe out homelessness, or buy free Chimichangas for everyone in Latin America. It could have even been about how we could confiscate money from the wealthy, and all our problems would go away because it would fully fund their essential new program to provide Corvettes to illegal immigrants.

Once again, all of it is based on magical thinking that goes something like this: “There’s an infinite source of money out there that could be used to buy anything our hearts desire if only we were willing to spend it.”

Honestly, it’s the sort of thinking you’d expect from children who’ve had their parents take them to a toy store and told them to “pick any one thing you want.” However, the people who believe this are not children. They’re adults, they’re activists, and they’re MEMBERS OF CONGRESS (I guess we could have an argument about whether they really believe this or they’re just trying to appeal to legions of not particularly bright people who do, but that’s a different column).

Ultimately, the problem with all of it is that it’s not based on math, real numbers, or reality. It’s based on thinking that doesn’t go much deeper than, “We’re really wealthy, so we should be able to buy pretty much anything!”

The problem with countering this type of thinking is that it’s not based on any type of logic or structure, so it’s very difficult to prove it wrong when you’re talking to people who have no concrete sense of how any of this works.

If you’ve ever heard the fable of Canute, he faced a somewhat similar situation. He was a very successful king, and he was surrounded by hangers-on who increasingly suggested that he had infinite power and could do no wrong. So, he decided to show them the error of their ways:

Canute was king of England before the Norman conquest. He died in 1035. Here is the tale as I heard it.

“A hundred years or more after the time of Alfred the Great, there was a king of England named Canute. King Canute was a Dane, but the Danes were not so fierce and cruel then as they had been when they were at war with King Alfred.

The great men and officers who were around King Canute were always praising him.

‘You are the greatest man who ever lived,’ one would say. Then another would say, ‘O king! There can never be another man so mighty as you.’ And another would say, ‘Great Canute, there is nothing in the world that dares to disobey you.’

The king was a man of sense, and he grew tired of hearing such foolish speeches.

One day, he was by the seashore, and his officers were with him. They were praising him, as they were in the habit of doing. He thought that now he would teach them a lesson, and so he had them set his chair on the beach close by the edge of the water.

‘Am I the greatest man in the world?’ he asked.

‘O king!’ they cried, ‘there is no one so mighty as you.’

‘Do all things obey me?’ he asked.

‘There is nothing that dares to disobey you, O king!’ they said. “The world bows before you and gives you honor.’

‘Will the sea obey me?’ he asked, and he looked down at the little waves which were lapping the sand at his feet.

The foolish officers were puzzled, but they did not dare to say ’No.’

‘Command it, O king! And it will obey,’ said one.

‘Sea,’ cried Canute, ‘I command you to come no farther! Waves, stop your rolling, and do not dare to touch my feet!’

But the tide came in, just as it always did. The water rose higher and higher. It came up around the king’s chair, and wet not only his feet, but also his robe. His officers stood about him, alarmed and wondering whether he was not mad.

Then Canute took off his crown and threw it down upon the sand.

‘I shall never wear it again,’ he said. ‘And do you, my men, learn a lesson from what you have seen?’”

I can’t take every liberal to the ocean, and if I did, they’d probably just declare that we were on stolen land and that the water was racist anyway but let me try to explain this in a way that even Bernie Sanders could potentially understand.

First of all, there certainly are some people who are wealthier than others, but there are different levels of wealth and different abilities to access that wealth.

For example, if you live in rural Alabama and have a million dollars in cash, you may be doing pretty well. On the other hand, if you have 12,000 dollars in cash and a home worth $988,000 that you can’t sell for some reason, you’re probably struggling hard even though you APPEAR to have a lot of money on paper.

Mike Tyson, who has been making a comeback of late, made over 400 million dollars in his career. That amount seems like more than a person could spend in a lifetime, doesn’t it? Yet, in 2003, Tyson filed for bankruptcy and said he was 23 million dollars in debt. How? Mansions, cars, Bengal Tigers – even a solid gold bathtub. It seemed like he had infinite money, but he didn’t:

Of course, you can make that kind of money and hang on to it. Joe Rogan certainly seems to have done that. He’s supposedly worth $200-250M dollars and seems to have a great time hunting, traveling, doing martial arts, and taking mind-bending substances, but he has notably steered clear of solid gold bathtubs as far as we know.

Still, there are lots more levels to the game. Elon Musk reportedly spent more than Joe Rogan’s entire net worth, 290 million, on the 2024 election. Elon Musk could afford that because he is reportedly worth a staggering 852 billion dollars, although he doesn’t actually have 852 billion dollars lying around. Much of that value is tied up in stock and his companies.

So, for example, if we had asked Elon Musk to pay America’s defense budget in 2025, he would have been unable to come up with the 850 billion dollars it would have taken to do that. Not only did he not have the capital sitting around, if he started selling everything he owned to raise it, people would have sensed his desperation, made lowball offers on his companies, etc., and he would have come up far short of that number.

Now, far more levels up, we’re looking at the “wealthiest nation in the world,” the United States. We took in 5.25 trillion dollars in taxes in 2025, which is a truly staggering number. It’s a number so big that it’s hard for us to wrap our heads around it – but again, it’s far from infinite. In fact, pretty much that ENTIRE AMOUNT is taken up just by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and defense spending.

Of course, you might be thinking, “Wait, a second. The government does a lot more than just those 5 things. What about putting on trans puppet shows in Serbia, funding studies into whether monkeys like to be poked in the eyes or not, and replacing Nancy Pelosi’s podium that imbecile stole on Jan 6?”

We’re going into debt to pay for all of that. We spent over 7 trillion dollars in 2025, which means we went roughly 1.8 trillion dollars further into the hole.

IN A YEAR.

This doesn’t register with many people because the money keeps getting borrowed and the can keeps getting kicked down the road. However, as you look at this chart, I want you to consider it in the light of the fact that there are roughly 100 trillion dollars in liquid assets ON THE WHOLE PLANET:

In other words, we are literally on pace to owe ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD in 22 years.

Is it possible? MAYBE. But we’re already putting almost 1/5 of the money we raise into paying INTEREST on the debt, and the more debt we pile on, the more people are going to want to loan us money.

Just as a thought experiment, if you knew someone who was 3 million dollars in debt and going deeper into debt every month to fund their lifestyle, how much of your hard-earned money would you be willing to lend them, and at what rate? That would feel very risky, right? So, if you did it at all, you’d want A LOT of money in return for doing it, wouldn’t you? Well, the United States is that guy on the world stage.

This is the backdrop we have to consider whenever someone says we should have ‘free’ homes, childcare, college, and give everyone a Maserati to drive around on their 16^th birthday because nice cars should be a ‘human right.’

Keep in mind that we have 340 million people in the United States, and many of those ‘free’ things people want to give away ARE NOT CHEAP. Even if we weren’t deeply in debt, which again, I want to remind you that we are, when you start paying for things on a massive scale, it’s almost unbelievably expensive, and almost all that money will have to be BORROWED.

Some people will claim that we can raise that money in taxes, but as a practical matter, that’s not true, as they’re seeing in California, where more than a trillion dollars’ worth of wealth has fled the state to get away from POTENTIALLY paying an excessively high tax rate.

Going beyond that, we’re already taxing the hell out of the rich, and we can only claw so much out of them without tanking our whole economy, which would also cause tax revenue to plunge:

In other words, there are massive amounts of money floating around, but the programs we’re already spending it on, like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, along with our irresponsible spending habits, are eating most of it up. So, we don’t have big pools of money sitting around to spend on new programs. In fact, we can’t even pay for the programs we already have. Some liberals will then say, “We should cut defense and take the money out of that,” but even if we liquidated our entire defense budget (which would be one of the worst ideas in human history) and relied on nothing but random bubbas with shotguns to defend the country, we would STILL BE RUNNING A HUGE DEFICIT.

At the end of the day, none of this is magic. There’s real money and real numbers that have to be accounted for, and yes, the United States can go just as broke as Mike Tyson did. At a certain point, Mike Tyson needed to stop thinking, “What new mansion or sports car should I buy today?” and needed to start thinking, “How do I reduce expenses?” Our country is in the same spot, and we don’t need new programs to give people Bengal Tigers and gold toilets; we need to find ways to DRAMATICALLY pull back on our spending before we lose it all, as Tyson did. The clock’s ticking, and by hook or by crook, our country is going to eventually get forced back to reality.

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