The truth about our national debt.

What a dumb take. The top 1% (earners of ~800k and up a year) pay 40% of all federal income taxes. You may think the rules are unfair but they still pay what they required too. Expand that to the top 10% of earners and that percentage increases to 75% of all income taxes. The tax tables are progressive for a reason and the tax laws are written as they are. Don’t get mad at the top earners for paying what they are required to, blame congress. Of course we could also look at the 50% who pay zero of get more back than paid in due to various credits. And this is not a sales taxes debate so please don’t mention that in any comments since everyone pays those and those are not federal but state and local.

The simple truth it’s that the federal govt brings in about 4.5T a year in taxes and sets a budget to spend 7T. You’d have to seize all the assets of all billions in the country to make up for the short fall for a single year.

It’s both. Money in – money out = deficit. Politicians can’t afford a calculator it seems.

Even with a 100% tax on all billionaires it would barely be enough to balance the budget. “Fair” share my ass. More like loot and pillage to keep up with the jones for another decade. Then when there’s nothing but a barren landscape left you’ll still end up in debt but this time no one has any wealth at all to pillage.

Thanks for sharing the Democrat’s talking points.

The wealthy pay their share based on tax law.

The fed is not a for profit entity, they are a charity subsidized by the citizens. Lazy, over spending persons who don’t worry about the bak account.

Mom said it was my turn to make bad takes on government finances

Would be great if it was this simple. But it’s from years of mismanaging our budget.

It doesn’t matter how much or how fast you try to fill a bucket if it has a massive hole in the bottom. We could take ALL of the wealth from the rich and it MIGHT last for about a year or so

All of the wealth they have (if it could be converted to liquid capital without externalities) would fund the government for 8 months. It’s spending

Common sense would be to eliminate the cap on FICA – too bad it won’t happen anytime soon

This is nowhere near accurate – you could liquidate all of the billionaires and millionaires and it wouldn’t close the gap. This is the kind of ‘simple’ analysis that leads to all sorts of erroneous beliefs about government and the economy.

Edit: Some context. There are about 816 billionaires who are US citizens. They are worth a combined 6.7 trillion dollars. A fuck load of money to be sure – if we were to liquidate them, we would in theory get 6.7 trillion, with which to pay debt. However, we can’t. And no – i’m not talking about it not being legal or ethical to seize a private individuals assets and sell them for the common ‘good’ though, that’s pretty horrifying if you think about it.

I’m talking about if you were to liquidate that kind of wealth its almost all in stock, and the act of selling something changes its value. Elon Musk isn’t worth 400 billion, his assets have a NOTIONAL VALUE of 400 billion dollars. You try selling everything he has? I’d be shocked if you got half of it. Why? Because of 2 reasons. 1. someone has to be on the other end of that trade, someone has to buy his assets (and we are liquidating billionaires after all) 2. the very act of selling his assets would require you to flood the market with those assets, and anytime you introduce a large supply of a commodity into the market, the price of those commodities goes down.

But lets say we are fine with the hit, and lets say the hit to their value is limited to 50% (it could well be more) now we have 3.35 trillion dollars or so. Huzzah! That amount won’t fix anything. Lets assume the 36 trillion is accurate, we can now pay 9% of it. Awesome – but the unfunded mandate over the next 75 years for social security is 25 trillion… we add in Medicare for the same time period it climbs to 78 trillion. Add the debt to it we have 114 trillion in government shortfall due, and while 2/3rds of it are due over the next 75 years but it’s still a huge problem. So we just upended the economy ruined 816 people (not making a value judgement on if they are ‘nice’ people or if they ‘deserve’ it. Some do, some don’t you think the guy who just won the mega millions for 1.22 billion is now somehow evil, where as the day before he won he wasn’t?)

You could add millionaires to the liquidation sure, and yeah you’d get more, but not a lot more. And I know what you’re thinking 50% of the countries wealth is held by the 1% how could you not get a lot more!!! Remember the 2 reasons we wouldn’t get 400 bills outta musk? Same rules apply to everyone else, if we liquidated the entire 1% we wouldn’t get 50% of the wealth of this country we would get VASTLY less, because you are greatly reducing the number of people who can afford to buy those assets, and the price at which they will be able to buy them.

So no – the government doesn’t have a taxing individuals problem (though the billionaires could definitely pay more), they have a taxing businesses problem. The US economy is a nearly 30 trillion dollar entity. Every one of those dollars flows through a business somewhere at some level. Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% lets say we want some deductions possible for legit expenses let say we cap the deductions to 6% of the total meaning that the government would collect tax 15% on the 30 trillion. That would raise federal government collections from 500 billion in 2024 to 4.5 trillion which would raise government income to 8.5 trillion per year. We could start knocking some shit down with that.

Edit 2: Yeah more sorry – we have a spending problem, but unlike what most conservatives will tell you it isn’t a spending problem on social welfare programs, or education, or research or government employees. It’s the military industrial complex. That is a big spending problem, but again here we are frustrated by having no simple solutions. You could say well just spend less, and sure. We spend 900 billion on defense, how much of that do you figure leaves the US? Almost none. The weapons, the ammo, the food, the logistics everything that our fighting men and women need to fuck shit up over there – is produced, bought and paid for here.

So what? well there is a huge section of the economy we are gonna affect if we draw back, and where do we draw back exactly? fewer weapons? less ammo? less ability to project power? That last one is the most likely, but even there we have a problem. The global economy is connected, and is connected based on the free trade and movement of goods. Free trade that has been largely guaranteed by the US military’s ability to project power and security. We pull back from that role, how does the world economy adapt, does piracy go up? do rogue actor states start wars for economic gain because they can? Yes and probably. How does that affect the 30 trillion dollar economy we live in?

There are no simple solutions. Period.

And corporations….

The top 10% pay over 75% of US taxes. What is being done with the money?

Don’t forget all the wars we didn’t pay for.

This is factually incorrect. Ffs

We have spent money our grandchildren haven’t earned yet.