Then what?

New York City Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani (Anna Connors/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

Government accountants recently reported that Social Security is in real fiscal trouble. The system is paying out about $230 billion per year more than it’s taking in from payroll taxes.

Those shortfalls are being covered for now by redeeming the U.S. Treasury bonds that Social Security was required by law to purchase back when it was running a cash surplus. (Fun fact, for decades those bonds were kept in an ordinary locked filing cabinet in a government office in Parkersburg, WV. Today, the records are all electronic.)

When Social Security needs cash to cover payouts to recipients, it presents one of those bonds to the U.S. Treasury Department for redemption. The funds are deposited in Social Security’s operating account, and everyone gets their monthly benefit.

But here’s the rub. At the rate of $230 billion a year in redemptions, those bonds will all be cashed in by 2033. After that, Social Security won’t have enough cash to cover its monthly payouts. If that were to happen today, it would mean an automatic 22 percent reduction in benefits to every Social Security recipient in the country. Things would get politically ugly really quick.

I bring this up not for purposes of doing a column on Social Security but rather to ask a pointed question of the Democratic Socialist mayors and congressional candidates that have lately been in the news.

Ladies and gentlemen, Social Security has been around for about 90 years. It’s not new. So, if there’s not enough money from taxation to cover a long-established program like Social Security, from where do you imagine the money will come to cover free housing, a guaranteed basic income for every citizen, free childcare, free college, free universal health care and all the rest of your grand socialist ideas?

Oh, wait, now I remember. You’ll get it from the rich. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and all those guys will finally have to pay their “fair share.” (Given the current leftist definition of “rich,” so, too will the guy who makes $400,000 a year owning car washes and the woman who makes $500,000 a year selling residential real estate.)

But here’s the problem. If you taxed the net worth of the 10 richest people in America at 100 percent, leaving them completely destitute, you’d cover the current federal deficit (which does not include all of new the free stuff you Democratic Socialists are proposing) for about a year and a half.

If you taxed the annual income of the much loathed “one percent” at the rate of 100 percent, you’d cover a bit less than half the present federal budget (again before all the new free stuff).

Then what?

And never mind that if you confiscated 100 percent of the wealth of guys like Musk, Bezos et. al., and if you confiscated 100 percent of the incomes of the most successful people in the economy, they’d immediately stop doing what they do to be so successful and tax revenue would then fall to zero. (Any of you enlightened lefties ever heard of the Laffer Curve?)

So, again I ask. Then what?

We’ll all hold our breath waiting for your answer.