Here’s a juicy phrase to wrap your teeth around: “Every billionaire is a policy failure”.

It is an absolute cracker of a line. I wish I had come up with it, but it is from Dan Riffle, policy advisor to US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As you can imagine, it is sending conservatives in the US crazy (well, crazier).

It prompts the question – what would you do with a billion dollars?

First let’s start with a million. Let’s assume you’re not buying a house (which is what most people would do if they suddenly had that amount of money). A couple going on a two-month first-class round-the-world trip, staying at top hotels and eating at good restaurants with, say, $10,000 for splashing on souvenirs and Broadway musicals would cost around $100,000.

So only $900,000 left. A car? $100,000 to your two kids to give them help with their mortgage? We’re still not even halfway.

Now remember that a billion dollars is a thousand million dollars.

Ok, make it $10m. We are definitely buying that house now. Say a $5m place, paid with cash so we don’t have to worry about a mortgage. How about $1m each to the two kids. That leaves us with $3m … a luxury car … a beach house … another world trip?

And just think, you would need to earn $10m every year for 100 years to get to a billion dollars.

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But that billion dollars doesn’t run out. All that money is earning interest somewhere. Let’s say just $10m of that $1bn is in a term deposit earning a lousy 3.5% per annum (leaving $990m to invest elsewhere), that alone gives you $350,000 a year.

It is an obscene amount of money. Not just rich, but so rich that you could not possibly spend the money if you tried.

And yet mention the line “every billionaire is a policy failure” and you get cries of how much tax they pay, that they pay the largest share of income tax, that such a policy position kills incentive.

So what about incentives? Are we really arguing that the incentive of starting a business is to earn a billion dollars? To earn more money than really is possible to spend?

Would a 70% tax rate on earnings over $10m a year really affect anyone’s desire to do work? Or could it be that at that level of money we’re not really talking about incentive to work but desire to accumulate more money in order to accumulate more money?

And when the incentives line is done, we are told “but we need the rich for all their philanthropy”. Ahh yes, sweet benevolence.

It is this line that saw historian Rutger Bregman at the Davos World Economic Forum tell a panel “almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance ... and of the rich just not paying their fair share ... stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes.”

But it is not just tax avoidance, it is tax policies designed to help with wealth accumulation.

It is why the argument led by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, that it is “just fundamental economics 101” that higher taxes weaken the economy, is rather poor.

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It looks at only one side of the budget balance. Yes, if you changed nothing else and increased taxes, that would slow the economy, although by how much depends on what taxes were being raised. But you also need to look at the other side of the ledger. If raising taxes slows economic growth, so too does reducing government expenditure – and again some expenditure cuts have more economic impact than others.

Moreover, we don’t raise or cut taxes – or government spending – just to slow or speed up the economy. We do it for a multitude of reasons, from reducing inequality, improving our defence, safety, health and education, or because we think a national broadcaster is a valuable service.

The figures the government is spruiking at the moment is an extra $200bn in taxes under the ALP.

It sounds a lot, but it is over 10 years and across a number of areas – such as the treatment of superannuation, discretionary trusts, franking credits, the budget repair levy and a different income tax policy. And many of these taxes will have little impact on economic growth. And crucially, the figure ignores the amount of spending the ALP proposes to do on the other side of the ledger, a key factor of economic growth.

The figure also ignores Labor’s own tax cut policies – for example, their “Australian Investment Guarantee” which will allow all businesses to immediately deduct 20% of any new eligible asset worth more than $20,000.

A big part of the $200bn is the $70bn extra the government argues will be taxed because the ALP will seek to remove the second and third stages of the tax cuts. But these only come into effect after 2022 and Labor has its own tax cuts which actually deliver bigger cuts to middle-income earners.

So it is not surprising the Liberal party is focussing on the removal of franking credit rebates for those who pay no tax (which was the original way dividends were treated until John Howard saw a means to buy some votes) as that would come into effect from July this year.

We need to remember what we’re talking about here. It will not hit every retiree. It is the removal of a tax rebate on a dividend you now get despite not paying any tax. You still get the dividend; you just don’t get the rebate.

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that 81% of all these excess franking credits in self-managed funds go to funds with a balance above $1.04m. When you note that the ANZ estimates that the average superannuation balance for someone aged 65-69 is just $207,105, it is clear we are not talking those on the breadline.

The level of wealth we are talking about here means this is not even just cutting back on Howard’s “middle class welfare”; it is about ending wealthfare – government policy designed to enrich further the already wealthy.

Just as with the “oh please, think of the billionaires” line, the government is using the claim that this policy will hurt philanthropy. The treasurer pointed to a submission by Cancer Council Queensland that cited a donor who has given $3.5m and another who donated $600,000 “over several years” who have indicated they are unlikely to continue.

Well, that is sad. But you do not pursue a taxation policy in order to fuel donations. Donations are required because of a lack of public funds!

The ALP estimates (and the government agrees) this policy will raise around $5.5bn a year. That is a lot of money that can be put to use on health and education or tax cuts for those whose prospective superannuation balances are likely to be well below $1m.

We are not at the “every billionaire is a policy failure” stage. I suspect members of the ALP would be somewhat hesitant to utter the phrase for fear of being labelled socialists (it doesn’t matter, they’ll still be labelled as such).

But we need to be honest about wealth – who has it, how it is accumulated and how government policies such as the franking credits rebates and the flattening of income tax rates actually increase that accumulation.

And we need to realise that talk of taxes is not just about economic growth, and economic growth is not just about taxes.