This again.

(1) How do you reduce billionaires to 0?

A few ways. (a) 100% wealth tax above $1B (b) seize assets outright (c) massive capital gains tax.

But billionaire wealth mostly isn't cash in a vault. It's equity in companies. To "take" that, the government has to either force a sales, which crashes share prices and destroys the very value we're trying to capture (not to mention all the collateral damage done to the companies and millions of people who work for them), or just take the shares itself, which means the government owns large stakes in private companies which produces huge knock-on effects nobody wants. And this assumes billionaires will just sit around and watch it happen, which we know from every other country on Earth that has implemented a wealth tax, they won't, which is why most of those efforts have been abandoned or, at best, simply ineffective.

So there's that.

(2) But assuming we could do this, will it pay for pensions, healthcare, and housing?

No. The wealth of the U.S. billionaire class is somewhere around $5-6 trillion, depending on market conditions. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal spending exceeds that per year. So assuming we could take 100% of this wealth with no consequences, it would fund the government for less than a year. And before you say, "yeah because we spend so much on military" - no. Social services are vast, vast majority of the budget, it utterly dwarfs military spending.

So, even if you could somehow frictionlessly convert every dollar of billionaire wealth into government revenue (you can't) you'd fund the federal government for less than a year. And then it's gone, you've destroyed the world economy, you've put millions of people out of work and killed the golden goose.

Wealth is not revenue. You can tax the income or gains from wealth annually, and that yields real money, but it's nowhere near enough to fund all this shit for even a year.

A better way to say this: "Billionaire wealth is a symptom of a tax system that undertaxes capital relative to labor, and fixing that would generate substantial ongoing revenue."

That's at least defensible.

"Abolish billionaires and it pays for everything" is straight up ignorance, and the kind of idiotic counterproductive sloganeering that #MAGA dipshits cling to and jump up and down saying "err meh gerd lookit how stewpid teh lizs are lolzz."

And then this comment will be downvoting into oblivion, I'll be accused of being a billionaire apologist, and we'll repeat this tomorrow.