National Review, How Much Money Do the Rich Have?, by Robert VerBruggen:

My colleague Kevin D. Williamson has a piece today about how hard it would be to close the $1.1 trillion budget gap by taxing “the rich.” I spent some time this weekend going through more detailed IRS data, and they support his conclusion.

Liberals believe, more or less, that once someone’s income reaches the “rich” threshold, they have little right to keep any additional dollars they make. Starting with that assumption, I set out to find how much “extra” money people really have. You can see my results here.

The best numbers I could find came from IRS returns in 2008. … [T]he cutoff the IRS uses is $200,000. … The first question is: How much do these folks make in total? The answer is about $2.5 trillion. If we wanted, we could stop here: You’d need to grab almost half that to finance the deficits Obama’s talking about.