Comment by rayiner
1 day ago
> And the country is run by a broken fool who has no interest or ability to fix any of that.
Trump will be gone in three years, but you'll still have an electorate that wants more free stuff while also getting tax cuts. There is zero appetite for fiscal reform in the U.S. The geometric growth rate of U.S. debt has been consistent since 2010 and will remain so when AOC is President: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...
You really really just need to raise taxes. Just find a way to sell that to the public (focus on the rich or large corporations or whatever outgroup you want basically)
Our budget deficit is $2 trillion. To close it, you need to significantly raise taxes on the fattest part of the income curve, which is the top 25%. They have $10 trillion of income. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in.... An across the board 200 basis point increase would close the deficit. That would raise their taxes to 38% at the low end to 46% at the high end, which is perfectly fine.
The problem is that the top 25% isn’t an “out group” in either coalition. You have Facebook PMs who vote blue and guys who own a small plumbing company who vote red both making $1 million+ annually and neither wanting their own taxes to go up. Then there are the guys below them looking up. Over 10% of the country will be in the top 1% of earners at some point in their life. So the guys pulling in a few hundred K as a senior engineer or construction manager don’t want their taxes to go up either.
> Over 10% of the country will be in the top 1% of earners at some point in their life
Though most of them only for one year due to temporary revenue, so it's not that rational.
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The wealthy have been taxed appropriately in the past, we just need to do it again. There is precedent.
The Peak Year (1944): The 94% rate applied to taxable income over $200,000 (which included a 3% regular tax and a 91% surtax). That $200,000 would be incomes over $3.8 Million today.
The High-Tax Era: Top marginal rates remained above 90% for two decades, spanning from 1944 through 1963.
This is supposedly the era that made America "great".
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> taking half of someone’s money is totally fine
Okay. Then let’s also reduce what’s spent welfare/benefits by a similar amount, at least we’re not taking money they worked for.
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Disagree. We have a spending problem, not a tax revenue problem. No matter how much the govt brings in, it will want to spend an increasing amount more.
Is there anything that can't be solved by bigger government?