Edit: Ignore this, I misread your question. I think you’re asking if we seized ALL the wealth from the 1%, not just their share of national debt.
U.S. federal debt is essentially all in the form of Treasury securities (a.k.a. “Treasuries”). So I think you’re asking how much debt the U.S. could eliminate by basically seizing all the Treasuries from its wealthiest investors and destroying them. I can’t find any data on much debt is owned solely by billionaires, however there are several web sites that give detailed breakdowns on Treasury ownership, like https://www.us-debt-clock.com/blog/who-owns-us-debt-breakdown. That site reports that individual investors own $6.7 trillion (18.6%) of U.S. debt. Although we don’t know how much of that is owned by billionaires, it does provide an upper-bound on how much they possibly could own. If we assume billionaires hold about half of that $6.7 trillion, then they account for about 9% of the total national debt. The U.S. spends about $900 billion annually on interest on it’s debt right now, so eliminating 9% of that would come out to about an $80 billion savings, which is a little over 1% of the annual federal budget of $7 trillion in 2025. If that was redistributed equally to all of the ~150 million U.S. taxpayers, then everyone would get about $500.
This is all based on a lot of guesswork and rough estimates, so take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: Ignore this, I misread your question. I think you’re asking if we seized ALL the wealth from the 1%, not just their share of national debt.
U.S. federal debt is essentially all in the form of Treasury securities (a.k.a. “Treasuries”). So I think you’re asking how much debt the U.S. could eliminate by basically seizing all the Treasuries from its wealthiest investors and destroying them. I can’t find any data on much debt is owned solely by billionaires, however there are several web sites that give detailed breakdowns on Treasury ownership, like https://www.us-debt-clock.com/blog/who-owns-us-debt-breakdown. That site reports that individual investors own $6.7 trillion (18.6%) of U.S. debt. Although we don’t know how much of that is owned by billionaires, it does provide an upper-bound on how much they possibly could own. If we assume billionaires hold about half of that $6.7 trillion, then they account for about 9% of the total national debt. The U.S. spends about $900 billion annually on interest on it’s debt right now, so eliminating 9% of that would come out to about an $80 billion savings, which is a little over 1% of the annual federal budget of $7 trillion in 2025. If that was redistributed equally to all of the ~150 million U.S. taxpayers, then everyone would get about $500.
This is all based on a lot of guesswork and rough estimates, so take it with a grain of salt.
YES