At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs.
The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years?
What happens if we don't pay off the debt?
The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential.
Situations like Japan are even more dire. A small increase in the interest rate results in a HUGE increase in interest expense at 260% debt to GDP ratios. Worse, their population is naturally shrinking a million people a year on account of their decades-long birth rate implosion. Hard to outgrow that.
false.
you are neglecting economic growth which increases tax receipts but does not increase the debt.
if government expenditure grows faster than economic growth, yes, bankruptcy is in the future.
Who am I kidding. The current administration showed us--what was it? last week?--that they prefer cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing the deficit.
Republicans ALWAYS increase the deficit. Democrats usually do, but not always.
It looks like we'll probably let the generation that created this mess retire like normal, and instead try to fix it by making their children and grandchildren work until death.
One company alone— Berkshire Hathaway— paid almost $27 Billion in taxes for 2024. That’s about 5% of all corporate taxes paid.
To really make money, you have to tax a bunch of smaller fish, not a handful of bigger fish. You need big numbers.
That’s politically unpalatable, especially for Republicans. ( Though Democrats seem to have no appetite for it either. )
In the past, Republicans would cut taxes ( popular ) while not spending as much ( unpopular ). Democrats would not cut taxes ( unpopular ) while spending more ( popular ).
Sadly, today both parties are acting like undisciplined parents. Everybody wants to give out the treats ( spend big ) while nobody wants to earn the paycheck ( raise the taxes ). It’s a bipartisan formula for disaster.
Yes. This means that if we double the taxes on the wealthy we will roughly double our total taxes collected. A neat trick.
It's true that the top 50% pay 97% of taxes, but that's not the slam dunk you think it is, because the top 50% have 97.5% of the wealth (see sources).
Your suggestion to tax the poor is stupid, because the poor have nothing more to give. Even if we could extract 10x the amount of taxes from the poor, it would barely be a blip. If the bottom 50% paid 10x the taxes, then they'd be contributing, what, like 15% of all taxes? We're going to take from the poor, take food out of their mouths, for 15% more taxes? Like I said before, its like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, there's just nothing there to squeeze.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... https://usafacts.org/articles/who-owns-american-wealth/
no, you won't, people change their financial decisions in the face of taxes. increasing taxes will slow the economy, bringing in a change of party in the whitehouse and congress, and taxes will be lowered again. high taxes don't work, and people don't like them.
>It's true that the top 50% pay 97% of taxes, but that's not the slam dunk you think it is, because the top 50% have 97.5% of the wealth (see sources).
taxes are on income, not wealth. the reason those percentage numbers and the wealth numbers come out the same is because poor people pay small or zero tax so it's as if their income is not counted
higher taxes on the wealthy will not benefit the poor, their taxes don't get lowered. However slowing the economy does hurt the poor
Instead of taxing income or spending, tax wealth. Will the wealthy make themselves less wealthy in order to avoid a wealth tax? I don't think so. Tax the top 1%; even with a wealth tax they'll still be able to afford multiple homes and a yacht--hell, there are people who can afford two homes and a yacht and don't even fall in the top 1%, so people will still be able to have plenty without ever actually paying a wealth tax.
Like one person I know is a German citizen living and working in the USA with a permanent resident visa, and she owns some forestry land in Canada. Should that land be subject to a wealth tax and if so how would you value it? Does the IRS then need to hire an army of bureaucrats to calculate valuations on those assets?
a wealth tax of 1% reduces the return on the stock market for that year to 6%, but it compounds onto follow-on years; if you "wealth tax" every year, that effectively lowers the return on the market very dramatically. If the returns on the stock market are lowered dramatically, you will see a huge slowdown in the economy.
the point of this is, there isn't really such a thing as a "wealth tax", it's just a "multiplied income tax". it might be different in your head, but you're wrong, it's not different in reality. you are welcome for the free education.
the question is, why is the only thing you can think of "take money from people who have it". that's a zero sum game, no wealth creation. What makes market economies so wonderful to live in is their wealth creation.
Why does Elon have so much money? wealth creation. Here's why: without Tesla, the roads would not be empty of cars, people would just buy different cars. There are other car companies, GM, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, etc.
Tesla is not taking your money. Tesla is offering an alternative car to buy with your money. With no Tesla, you would plunk your money down on one of those other brands, but if you like Tesla's better, you buy one of those. That creates happiness, you are happier spending your money on a Tesla than on the alternatives. That's the money that Elon is collecting, GM's money and some extra for your excitement/satisfaction. And he deserves it because he created it and you are happy that he did. You would not be richer without Tesla. You would buy a different brand, and be out the same amount of money, and enjoy your car less. So when you think "we need to take Elon's money" you are essentially saying "I wish Elon didn't exist and I want the crappy Nissan for less money". That's a spiral into the ground because the other company's don't put as much value into their cars as Tesla and if you paid them less, they'd produce less.
If your response to this is "I would never buy a Tesla, I don't even like them", then I will just shake my head sadly at your inability to learn even more.
I suggested a wealth tax only on the top 1%. (Or on the top 0.1% might work better, the specific number isn't the main point.)
The top 1% didn't get there through average stock returns, so the stock arguments are not applicable. Most stock participants would not have a wealth tax.
One of the major themes of this entire thread is that retirement age will have to be raised, with some even saying that any retirement at all is unusual and unsustainable. So do please tell me more about market economics and their wealth creation. Why are we regressing in our market economy? What does it mean when the things that happen in a successful market economy aren't happening?
As for Elon. Even with my proposed wealth tax, he would still be the world richest man. Especially if he continues to run successful businesses. A wealth tax doesn't immediately erase all the wealth of those it applies to.
As a business, you can deduct VAT that you had to pay to others from the VAT you charged your customers, and you only pay the difference.
So the only people who end up paying are the final consumers. It is essentially cost neutral to a business - you just have to account for it properly.
UPDATE: in the UK, at least.
Snark aside. I've always heard the idea was that free markets and competition would drive down prices, and that if a company was to just raise their prices, they would actually lose money because people would buy from a competitor with better prices. Turns out companies can just raise prices though. What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
Well, when they have a monopoly, yes, yes they can.
> Is that free market competition in action?
No.
QSBS is capped, and the SALT deduction goes away with increasing MAGI. They're targeted at the upper middle class, not the wealthy.
The "S" in QSBS stands for "Small" business.
The previous limits were fixed, and this change seems to be adjusting it for inflation. It's been around since 1993. An inflation adjustment is not a "cut".
Even so, as I'm sure you're aware, these two items are not what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy". If you ask anyone (other than a tax accountant) what a QSBS deduction is, you'll get a blank stare.
Things like QSBS and carried interest are absolutely part of what people mean by "tax cuts for the wealthy".
No they aren't. Nobody mentions them on the news/editorials, nobody's heard of them but you and I. What people meant is the marginal tax rate.
I am not a tax accountant, and never heard of them before your mention. I spent some time googling it, and it looks like the limits were adjusted for inflation.
You're wrong that nobody's heard of these things and that they aren't in the news. Pick up the NYT or Fortune or any moderately substantive source. These issues have been discussed all over for decades, and they came up again repeatedly in the context of the BBB. QSBS and SALT came up because of their expansions, and carried interest came up because Trump promised to eliminate it but didn't. I didn't go digging for this information. It was handed to me.
More importantly you're wrong that people only think of tax cuts in terms of marginal rates, and that they need to know about specific schemes like QSBS and carried interest to include them in the broader idea of tax cuts for the wealthy. People have a general awareness that such schemes (popularly: "loopholes") exist and benefit the wealthy. The names of the schemes and how each one works don't matter. People know they exist and what they amount to.
So: The idea that people don't know about specific tax schemes used by the wealthy, and therefore don't think of these schemes as tax cuts for the wealthy, is wrong, and the idea that people need to know about specific tax schemes used by the wealthy in order to think of those schemes as tax cuts for the wealthy is also wrong. The first is wrong empirically, and the second is wrong logically.
> you're wrong that people only think of tax cuts in terms of marginal rates
No evidence for your case, other than a vague notion of "loopholes".
Besides, there is no requirement for wealth in order to invest in a QSBS.
As for SALT, it starts getting phased out at $500,000 and goes to zero at $1m.
Or are you saying the Trump tax cuts never benefited the wealthy at all?
Of course. It's disingenuous to claim that not raising taxes is a "cut".
It's the same lie as claiming a reduction in a spending increase is a "budget cut".
There are actual tax cuts in Trump's bill, but they don't apply to the wealthy.
It's not a "cut", it's just that the BBB makes taxes lower for the wealthy than they would have been without the BBB <eyeroll>.
I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years.
My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935.
He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here.
Rephrased, it's just as problematic, albeit with a kernel of truthiness:
Clearly some of us are still fully capable of doing manual labour at 67 but those who have spent their lives doing software "engineering" have usually accumulated some significant mental burn out by that age. They need a break.Quite an assumption on your part.
Despite having serious mathematical qualifications and several million SLOC of code behind me, I've also worked cattle stations, mine sites, and been part of SES and St. John's Ambulance crews (first responders to accidents).
That said, to address your question,
he's not worked with either Aaron Swartz nor Terry Davis.
The outside view is that the US has minimal Occ Health & Safety enforcement in labour and was late to the game in any case.
Given that, software work at 67 should be well within cognitive limits.
(I'm actually not sure if I'm being sarcastic)
It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
In the most recent bill, the rules for writing off private jets changed such that you can take the entire write-off in one year instead of over the life of the plane. This alone is set to cost hundreds of billions of dollars [1].
Of the ~433T in debt over the entire life of the US, ~$8T of that came from Trump's first term [2].
Some people physically break their bodies and risk their lives doing necessary but relatively low-paid work. But telling baggage handlers, construction workers, agricultural workers, firemen, commeercial fishermen and agricultural workers that they need to work to 70 instead of 65 so the debt doesn't balloon while allowing Jeff Bezos a much bigger tax break in buying his 3rd private jet is utterly bananas.
[1]: https://inequality.org/article/the-big-beautiful-bill-would-...
[2]: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-...