The next time someone tells you we can fix our fiscal problems by raising taxes on Wall Street, throw this back in his (or her) face:

Three years later, the financial sector, despite coming under scrutiny for its role in the financial crisis, has returned to prominence, accounting for 29 percent — $57.7 billion — of U.S. profits during a record-breaking fourth quarter last year, notes the Wall Street Journal.

So that was a particularly good quarter. Let’s assume every quarter is like that (which it isn’t, but let’s say it is for argument’s sake). That means annual profits for the entire American financial sector total about $230 billion. That’s everything, including those greedy Wall Street banks and brokers. Everything in the entire American financial sector. All of it for one year.

Sounds like a lot of money, right? And it is — out of context. The annual deficit for the federal government tops $1 trillion and has reached $1.65 trillion in recent years. The federal debt now tops $15 trillion. Unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare Part D? More than $100 trillion (with a “t”). The federal budget for 2011 was $3.82 trillion.

So let’s do some basic math here. We take the federal budget and divide it by 365 days. The federal government therefore spends an average of $10,465,753,424 per day. Now, divide the profits of the entire financial sector for a year by that $10 billion+ number. That gets you about 23 days of federal spending. Feel free to check that math and let me know if you spot an error.

So, if you took every dime of profit from the entire American financial sector for an entire year you still wouldn’t have enough money to fund the federal government for a month. You would take an annual deficit of $1.65 trillion and it would become an annual deficit of $1.42 trillion. Wow, what an improvement.

Again, feel free to check my math. But David Burge came up with the same numbers.

Such is the scale of the fiscal calamity in which we find ourselves. Even if you could seize every dollar of profit from the entire American financial sector for an entire year, you still wouldn’t get anywhere close to making a big dent in the annual federal deficit. Put the situation in context next time Aunt Sally tells you our problems can be solved by taxing the banks some more.