US annual budget gap hits nearly $2T, largest in 5 years
reuters.com
reuters.com
Inflation is a form of debt repayment by way of regressive taxation imposed on the middle and below with interest delivered to the rich.
ETTD is a thing for a reason, I'm trying to be optimistic (and civically active) that the country is an exception to this rule.
It’ll also keep getting worse as the country fractures into more and more blocs that can be kept together only through the promise of more free stuff that someone else will pay for.
Maybe instead of looking at "the world outside the U.S." you could look into fundamental economics? As I explained above, repayment by inflation is a regressive tax imposed on the middle and below, with interest paid to the rich. This is only cosmetically different from what Sweden and France are doing.
These are strategies for people who get confused about the differences between billions and trillions. For example, 74% of people who support medicare for all think it could be paid for entirely by taxing billionaires: https://echeloninsights.com/hubfs/_Media%20for%20Insights%20.... That’s off by an order of magnitude
We have to raise taxes $2 trillion in the first year to balance the budget, even with no new spending. Realistically, we need to raise taxes $3-4 trillion to balance the budget and pay for universal healthcare and childcare. Nobody is talking about how to do that. Ironically, Trump’s tariffs have raised triple the estimated annual tax revenue of AOC’s 70% marginal tax rate proposal from 2019, and about as much as Warren’s wealth tax proposal would have in the first year.
People have this fixation on wealth taxes because it's a bigger number. But it's very third world thinking--people who want to eat the seeds instead of saving them to plant next year. Just tax income enough to raise the tax revenue you need.
You are simply illustrating rayiner's point: you don't understand the financial side of running the government, you have no knowledge of actual figures, neither current nor historical, but believe that taxing rich guys even more will solve all the problems we have.
I guess you're right, I don't understand. We mustn't tax the wealthiest people, and no amount of actual figures is going to convince people like you folks otherwise, not when there are billionaires to glaze.
I've been alive for quite a while now, and my actual _lived experience_ is republicans have cut taxes on the wealthy every time they've been in power for decades and decades, but sure keep trying to convince us that "billionaires are paying more taxes than ever!" and that ackshually it's the damn poors who aren't being taxed enough!
If you wanted to go to high marginal rates on income, that’s the AOC 70% top margin rate proposal I mentioned above. Even optimistic estimates are that it would raise like $30-70 billion a year. We need to raise taxes by 30-50 times as much just to close the budget deficit.
And what _I_ actually want to do is tax all the individual billionaires out of existence and also have a high marginal rate on income, because why not both?
I would phrase it differently: democratic elections everywhere tend to be won by promising free stuff, and even the US is not immune to this tendency.
During the first 140 years of democratic elections in the US, the average voter got approximately zero free stuff. E.g., when the Dust Bowl made 100s of 1000s of families completely destitute, they received no substantial assistance from (state or Federal) governments: the free stuff started flowing a couple of years after that when FDR took office.
BTW the US economy was already 3 times the size of the next largest economy (the UK) at the start of the Dust Bowl.
One reason the democratic disease of free stuff took so long to manifest in the US is that the disease is largely incompatible with the central principle of the US theory of governance, namely, to maximize freedom for the average person.
Another reason is that life was easier for the average person in the US than it was almost anywhere else in the world. E.g., there were no invasions by Mongols, Teutonic Knights, Tatars, Turks, Finns, Swedes or Napoleonic armies that severely interfered with millions of lives as was the case in Russia. (Native Americans never posed a comparable military threat to European settlers. E.g., they never took and held a settler city or even a settler town that I know of.)
Yes, and it got locked into the system because mass immigration changed the ideological composition of the country. Our current massive peacetime deficits dates back to Reagan’s compromise to win over Catholics and white ethnics (those were the “Reagan democrats”). Catholics had voted as a bloc for democrats for the better part of a century (JFK won 80% of their vote). Reagan this pivoted to tax cuts, social conservatism and anti-communism, which could unify catholics, evangelical whites, and much of the old Anglo and German GOP. But he could never push meaningful spending cuts because it would blow up the coalition.