Ray Madoff

The country took in $5 trillion from all sources, just under $5 trillion.

That's income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax, estate and gift taxes.

Tariffs, everything, right?

Fees at the National Park, total revenue just under $5 trillion.

We spent $6.8 trillion.

So we had a shortfall.

We had to add to our national debt.

We had to borrow to make that $1.8 trillion deficit to cover it, causing huge problems.

to have this growing debt.

Meanwhile, at the same time, the richest 1% of Americans owned $55 trillion.

I say that, and we know that there are all sorts of ways that that wealthiest 1%, not just the billionaires, are able to avoid taxes because they don't pay taxes on their most common sources of income, which is their investment gains and their inheritances.

So the failure to bring them into the tax system, I find it hard to believe that we wouldn't have been able to easily cover that $1.8 trillion shortfall by taxing people that owned $55 trillion.

I don't think that's the case at all.

I mean, if we're talking about – when you start using a number like the GDP, the GDP is enormous.

So you can't really see the differences, right?

I don't think the differences of raising $4.9 trillion and $7 trillion when you're talking about in relation to GDP is going to be a significant difference.

So I don't think that that's what we're doing.

It's a travesty, and it's a giveaway, and it is—I couldn't agree with you more.

So, I mean, we need to fix the tax code and we need to fix the IRS.

AI is really going to cause a problem for our tax system, if you think about it.