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Comment by ryanf | Hacker News Reader

> Cut all discretionary and defense spending to 0, and we would still be running a deficit due to entitlements. Tax "the rich" at 100%, and we would still be running a deficit. Tax corporations at 100%, and we would still be running a deficit.

Do you have some numbers for this?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

In 2010 Total income was about 2.1T and total expenses were about 3.5T. Defense was about 23% of spending and discretionary spending was about 12%.

3.5T * (100% - 23% - 12%) = 2.275T

So thats still about a 175 Billion dollar deficit.

Admittedly 2010 was a below average year in terms of the US economy. In better years things might not look as bleak.

OK, so that covers the first sentence, except maybe "because of entitlements." (Although you'll note that without TARP we'd be just about breaking even in that scenario.)

It doesn't cover the second half, which claims that taxing "the rich" at 100% wouldn't cover the deficit even though the total income of the richest 1% of Americans is almost as much as the entire federal budget. (23.9% of income, GDP is 14.27T, 14.27 * 0.239 = 3.41T)

Thanks for supplying those numbers harryh!

It's not far off. The US deficit in 2010 was $1.42 trillion, while discretionary spending was $1.36 trillion [1]. The total household income in 2006 was ~$7 trillion [2], of which the top 1% ("rich") make over 20%, which would be around $1.4 trillion in 2006. Presumably the number is lower in 2010. Additionally, we couldn't really take 100% of that money in taxes, because they are already being taxed at 40% or so. It's not clear to me how to calculate total corporation income, but the deficit is about 10% of the GDP, so it's probably not true.

As far as I can tell, none of these numbers are exceptional (percentage-wise) compared to other countries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... - mean income*number of households

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/06/us-income-gap-rich-...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub...

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