G'day, Mates. Today is Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026 — the first day of a new month, and somehow it's also National Chicken Boy Day, which nobody's going to explain and I'm not going to ask.
My calendar says it's Forgiveness Day, Chicken Boy Day, No Rhyme Nor Reason Day, Burnt Ends Day, Hotel Employee Day, and Acne Positivity Day. Forgive somebody, thank a hotel employee, eat some burnt ends off the smoker, and don't overthink today's calendar — half of it has no rhyme or reason, apparently by design.
Today in history:
1715: King Louis XIV of France dies after a 72-year reign, the longest of any monarch in European history.
1878: Emma Nutt becomes the world's first female telephone operator, hired by Boston's Telephone Dispatch Company.
1897: Boston opens the first subway system in North America.
1902: Georges Méliès' pioneering film "A Trip to the Moon" premieres in France, one of the earliest works of science fiction cinema.
1939: Nazi Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II in Europe.
1969: Muammar Gaddafi seizes power in Libya in a military coup, ruling the country for the next 42 years.
1972: Bobby Fischer defeats Boris Spassky to become World Chess Champion, the first American ever to hold the title.
1983: A Soviet fighter jet shoots down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 people aboard, including a sitting U.S. congressman.
2004: Chechen separatists seize a school in Beslan, Russia, taking more than 1,100 hostages in a three-day siege that ultimately kills over 330 people, many of them children.
Birthdays today include: Lily Tomlin, actress- comedian (9 to 5, Grace and Frankie); Barry Gibb, singer-songwriter; Dr. Phil McGraw, television host, psychologist; Zendaya, actor (Euphoria, Dune).
If it's your day, too, have a great one.
* * *
Let's talk about money. More specifically, tax money — and the fairy tale some politicians keep selling about where America's debt actually comes from.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and their fellow travelers regularly present the same comforting little morality play: America is drowning in $40 trillion of debt because billionaires aren't paying their "fair share." It's a grade-school-simple story — the greedy billionaire sitting atop a mountain of money, the suffering little guy, and the government standing nobly between them with a tax bill in one hand and a shopping list in the other. The only problem is that the story falls apart the moment you do something politicians generally prefer you not do: run the numbers.
So let's run them because we need to destroy this myth.
According to Forbes' 2026 billionaires list, the United States has 989 billionaires with a combined net worth of roughly $8.4 trillion. For the sake of argument, let's make this fantasy as generous as it can possibly get. Let's take everything — not just liquid assets, but the stocks, the privately held companies, the real estate, the investment accounts, the yachts, the art, whatever else billionaires happen to own. Every last dollar. Then let's dump the entire $8.4 trillion straight into the Treasury and apply it directly to the national debt.
Congratulations. You've just confiscated the entire American billionaire class, and you've only paid off about 21% of a $40 trillion debt. You'd still owe roughly $31.6 trillion. That's not a solution. That's not even a real down payment.
And even that number is fantasy accounting. Here's why: Forbes' figures aren't piles of cash sitting in a vault — most billionaire wealth consists of ownership stakes in publicly traded and privately held companies, estimated by market prices and valuation methods, not actual bank balances. Elon Musk is the spectacular example: his roughly $892 billion fortune, according to Forbes' real-time tracking as of September 1, 2026, is tied overwhelmingly to Tesla and SpaceX stock.
So, unlike what the hard left would have you believe, there's no Scrooge McDuck vault sitting somewhere with $892 billion in hundred-dollar bills stacked to the ceiling. If Washington announced tomorrow it intended to liquidate every billionaire's fortune and send the proceeds to the Treasury, it couldn't simply wave a wand and collect the headline number. It would have to actually sell the assets — and forcing that much supply onto a market all at once crashes the price of exactly what you're trying to cash in. The act of liquidating the wealth destroys a chunk of the wealth you were counting on collecting in the first place.
Let's rephrase that: Remove all the rich folks. Who would have the money to buy those assets?
But let's be extraordinarily charitable and assume the government somehow banks the full $8.4 trillion anyway. You're still sitting on a $31.6 trillion hole. And here's the part the political theater conveniently skips: you only get to confiscate that money once. The debt doesn't stop. The Treasury doesn't stop borrowing. Interest doesn't stop accruing. Federal spending doesn't magically hit zero because Washington held a billionaire yard sale. You get your $8.4 trillion once, and then what?
Next year you need another $8.4 trillion, and the year after that — except you've already emptied the piggy bank, and you can't rob it twice. If your answer is, "well, we'll just tax them every year," you're no longer talking about confiscating wealth to eliminate debt. You're talking about a recurring tax regime whose success depends entirely on those same assets continuing to exist and grow — a considerably different proposition, and one that requires the very billionaires you just vaporized to still be around producing wealth to tax.
There's also a small, inconvenient document called the Constitution standing in the way. The Fifth Amendment says that the government can't deprive a person of property without due process, and can't take private property for public use without just compensation. "Take every billionaire's stuff and use it to pay the government's bills" isn't merely an economic fantasy — it's a constitutional nonstarter. No wonder the left, particularly the Democrat Socialists, say they want to demolish the Constitution, huh?
And here's where the arithmetic gets genuinely embarrassing. The entire world's billionaire population — not just America's — had a combined fortune of $20.1 trillion on Forbes' 2026 list. Confiscate every billionaire on Earth, every country, every fortune, all of it, and America's roughly $40 trillion debt still isn't paid off. You've erased the entire global billionaire class and covered about half of one country's debt, with exactly zero dollars left over for anyone else's. The entire planet's billionaire class could vanish overnight, and Washington would still be drowning.
That's because America's debt isn't fundamentally a billionaire problem. It's a spending problem.
The Treasury's own fiscal data lay it out plainly: federal debt accumulates when the government runs deficits, spending more than it collects, year after year. That's the part that conveniently gets lost every time the political class rolls out the billionaires-as-villains routine. It's a lot easier to point at Elon Musk than to stand in front of a crowd and say, "We spent more than we collected, administration after administration, Congress after Congress, and borrowed the difference every single time." That speech doesn't write itself. "Eat the rich" fits on a T-shirt a lot more easily.
Now let's talk about the money Washington is already losing, because there's a real problem here that doesn't require inventing a billionaire piñata.
The Government Accountability Office reported federal agencies made an estimated $186 billion in improper payments during fiscal year 2025 — up roughly $24 billion from the year before. Since FY2003, that cumulative total has reached roughly $3 trillion. Before anyone starts screaming "fraud," worth noting: improper payments aren't synonymous with fraud. GAO's definition covers payments that shouldn't have been made at all, payments made in the wrong amount, and other errors. In FY2025, about $153 billion of that total — roughly 82 percent — was straightforward overpayment. Still $153 billion of taxpayer money that went somewhere it wasn't supposed to go, and still worth fixing.
Then there's actual fraud. GAO estimates annual direct financial losses to the government from fraud could run anywhere from $233 billion to $521 billion, based on FY2018-2022 data. And then there's the tax gap — the IRS's own estimate of taxes legally owed but never collected, currently pegged at $696 billion gross for tax year 2022, or roughly $606 billion net after accounting for enforcement and late payments. Do you suppose that would make a dent in the debt?
It's worth being careful because people love stacking these numbers as though each one occupies a completely separate bucket. They don't. The fraud estimate and the improper-payment estimate overlap in meaningful ways, and the tax gap is a genuinely separate category from both. But even with those qualifications built in, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year in identifiable fiscal leakage and uncollected revenue. That's real money, and unlike the billionaire-confiscation fantasy, it's money you can go collect again next year, and the year after, without destroying an entire class of citizens or hoping the stock market survives a fire sale. You simply have to make government better at doing something it should have been doing all along: collect what it's legally owed, and stop handing money to people who aren't legally entitled to it. Imagine that.
Here's the genuinely inconvenient part. If you actually reduced fraud, eliminated improper payments, improved tax compliance, and — perhaps most radical of all — restrained spending, you'd be addressing the actual mechanics of the problem. You wouldn't need a villain. You wouldn't need a billionaire class to hate. You wouldn't need a campaign rally full of people chanting about somebody else's bank account. And therein lies the real problem for the people selling this story: "government needs to stop spending money it doesn't have" is a remarkably poor applause line for politicians whose entire business model runs on promising to spend more of it.
So instead, we get the morality play. The billionaire gets cast as the villain. The politicians — every one of them millionaires, remember — arrive as the heroes. The checkbook comes out. And the debt keeps growing.
Once Washington finally exhausts the billionaires, somebody will discover another group that hasn't yet paid its "fair share." Millionaires, probably. Then people with particularly healthy 401(k)s. Then anyone who's owned a business long enough to accumulate some capital. The target can always change. The rhetoric can always change. The villain can always change.
But there's one thing that never seems to change. Washington keeps spending. And that's the number we should actually be talking about.
This is why I've said in the past and will repeat: I will take a lecture on morality from many people, many groups. But not from leftists. And given their demonstrated lack of simple math skills, I'm not buying their budgetary arguments, either.
Thought for the Day: Louis XIV ruled for 72 years and still couldn't outlast the debt his own extravagance piled up — proof that even the longest reign in European history couldn't out-spend arithmetic forever. Interesting how that lesson never gets learned, isn't it?
VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts in the comments. Your voice matters.
Take care today, Gang. I hope to see you and a friend here tomorrow.
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