When we believe that government programs are working well, we tend to like them just fine,

until tax time rolls around and we're faced with the reality that some share of the money to run those programs comes directly from us.

We love tax cuts that promise to let middle and working class Americans keep more money.

But if raising taxes on regular people, even to fund popular programs is a hard sell,

who could object to taking more from the tiny subset of Americans who quite literally have more money than they could spend in a lifetime?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Lately, there's lots of talk about taxing billionaires.

Advocates in California are trying to get a one-time levy on the state's billionaires onto the ballot for November.

At the federal level, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna have a plan.

They say would take money from fewer than 1,000 Americans and generate revenue to meaningfully improve the finances of every American household earning under $150,000 a year. Why wouldn't every non-billionaire

be excited about this? My guest is here to explain. Megan McArdle is a columnist at the Washington

Post, where you can read her article, The Myth of the Billionaire Wealth Tax. She is also host of the

podcast, reasonably optimistic. Megan, welcome to think.

Thanks for having me. So as I mentioned, there are a couple of versions of this floating around right now.

The Bernie Sanders Roe-Kana plan is called the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. What do Sanders

and Kana think would be a fair share amount for billionaires to pay?

Five percent of their wealth.

And look, I think I understand why people look at that money and think, well, they can't even spend what they have.

Why not just take it and do something better with it?

But as I write in the

column, it's a little more complicated than that for a few reasons. And the first is that taxes

are actually much harder to collect than you think. So this is what economists and social scientists

...