I think it’d be great to sell off all the Federal land. Yellowstone National Park, and all them other national parks, for instance, would be bought up in a minute by the oil companies and mining companies for a pretty penny. The White House, too, is prime property, and that big stretch of land around the Washington Monument would go for a fortune to developers who want to put up condominiums. And Arlington National Cemetary could be paved over for a shopping center, and we’d get millions for it.
Mount Rushmore, man, they’d sell that to advertising firms – who would pay millions for the opportunity to put neon advertisements on George Washington’s forehead. And to carve a huge Coca-Cola can on the empty space near Teddy Roosevelt.
Although the shopping center developers might get out-bid by the Lee family or the Virginia Historical Society or some such, who’d want to put General Lee’s house back where it originally stood.
The difference is that rich people spend a much smaller fraction of their income buying the kinds of things that could be subjected to excise (or sales) tax than poor people do. The population as a whole would have to pay the same amount, but which members of the population would be shouldering the bulk of the burden would shift dramatically.