If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/222127/quarterly-corpora...
where did the wealth gone? Nowhere. It never existed. The 10 million were just a guess
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
It is pretty absurd that one can borrow against a mountain of owned stocks and live of the loan without it being considered income.
The burger is taken from the poorest person that was able to buy a burger. Now you have 2 people who cannot buy a burger.
This is why you cannot tax unrealized gains. You are sacking the poorest. Is not matter of how the government gets the money. The problem is that the government spends the money.
The poorest always pay all government spending. Always.
Apparently you can buy islands, super yachts and more with unrealized gains.
You can take out a loan secured with assets as collateral, but you're buying something with that debt not unrealized gains. If your asset prices go to zero you still own the yacht because you still owe that debt.
Get sloppy and we end up with more loopholes and bullshit.
It's called "the marginal propensity to consume", which means that as a person gets richer, consumes a smaller percentage of his fortune.
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no real effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
Increasing the tax rate doesn't fix that because you'd still have workers paying the high prices to corporations even if the government subsequently took more of the money.
What happens if you have to buy a product from a monopolist so they currently take your last $100, and then the government comes and says they have to pay 80% of it in tax? Best case the government gives the money directly to you, but then there is still a monopoly, so they just raise the price by the amount it takes to extract all of your money again. Worst case, the money doesn't go to you, it goes to some cronies who will now be using it to lobby to increase the amount you pay, and have just demonstrated that they're more politically connected than the original corporations.
To actually fix it you have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
I have half-jokingly wish a president would introduce a 95% tax bracket at some ridiculous number so this statistic will die.
The highest effective tax rate was in the 70's.
This hits people much more than only getting less money.
Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.
i dont understand. the economy is the royal we doing things. the economy doesnt experience time if we arent doing thongs to ourselves. this isnt a distinction with a difference
This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.
Figure 1: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-the-national-de...
I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?
Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.
Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.
Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.
https://www.crfb.org/papers/riches-rags-causes-fiscal-deteri...
>Rising spending relative to GDP explains about two-thirds of the growth in annual budget deficits since 2001, while declining revenue explains one-third.
>Most debt (77% of GDP) can be attributed to bipartisan legislation.
See also the "Debt Under Various Counterfactuals" projection, where the debt would have been roughly the same under two scenarios, "Without Major Tax Cuts" and "Without Major Spending Increases".
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-debt-got-100-gdp-riches-rags-...
the big spend since 2001 was going to war
It's depressing to look at the before/after federal deficit estimates over the last two decades without the Bush tax cuts, even before taking out the Trump 1 tax cuts (and future projections from the recent Trump 2 cuts in the BBB). Just a huge unforced error that was completely foreseeable each time.
Contrary to public perception and PR, the "party of fiscal responsibility" has consistently been a disaster for controlling the deficit.
But Clinton was a bit of a correction—not perfect by any means—to Reagan, who lit a bunch of gasoline on the "don't tax and DO spend" fire. Too bad even Reagan would look like some sort of TDS cuck RINO to the current conservatives...
So if one guy figures out some rhetorical tricks to convince an entire generation that ACTUALLY tax cuts will INCREASE revenue and HELP the deficit... while meanwhile massively increasing it under his administration... that guy still has responsibility for it decades later. (Throw in the hollywood greed-is-good-everyone-screw-over-your-neighbor-and-do-cocaine enthusiastic adoption of the era for good measure.)
At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.
People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.
Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.
An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.
Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.
consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.
All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.
Democracy is illusory.
In my opinion, we don't have a democracy problem, we have an education problem. Too many voters support policies that sound nice on paper but are disastrous when put into practice.
I don't think many people even know what liberalism means today. It gets treated like a synonym for progressivism, which itself is poorly defined and used as a synonym for a DNC voter.
Nobody wants "experts" at any level of government.
The question that reveals your actual politics: where do want experts? I want them on staff or retainer, quickly accessible to representatives at every level of government.
Did you not see how the entire pandemic response played out? There are still YouTube videos of a huge swath of politicians and media outlets telling people not to do their own research and to just listen to those in charge of the relevant federal agencies.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Lots of blood on their hands.
Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.
It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.
And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.
That's a real difference for many millions of people.
Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.
By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.
Just also pay attention to the active battles.
Nobody here is suggesting this.
I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.
Nowhere in my comments or link does it say that. You're attempting a strawman and failing.
The American people don't actually want this. They don't vote for any of these policies. They actively vote and protest against them. But there's no true mechanism available to the public for ousting elected or appointed officials outside of scheduled times. Recalls have no enforcement. Impeachments have no enforcement! When you know you've got a protected period to wreak havoc in, you do it without worry. Especially if you're doing that in service of people who have broken the systems so they cannot be pried out of their positions, and who will pay you handsomely for bloodying your hands during that two or six year stint.
The public just has to hope whoever they're voting for isn't lying to them, because if that representative is then there's nothing the public can do to punish them in time.
If the answer to that question is simply "the same thing they've done for the past few decades" then the reasonable conclusion to draw is again -- that the American people are collectively fine with the state of their country and the growing inequality and shrinking democratic power that the individual American has.
There are a myriad of responses that the American people could have to this growing problem, that range from legal to illegal, from scrupulous to unscrupulous but the American people collectively choose the path of least resistance, they choose the status quo.
America looked at Jan 6th and collectively decided that doing nothing was the best course of action. No further response was needed. Just clean the riff-raff out of the capitol and get back to business as usual.
If you're an American look around and remember that what you see as good as it gets, and that it's all downhill from here because that's what everyone wants.
Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.
I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.
It sucks. I hate it here.
The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.
If you can't be honest that some folks out there are, in fact, pushing much worse agendas than others... then how do you hope to convince anyone to evaluate if anyone else is gonna actually do better than either? You can't easily have those critical thinking skills without noticing the differences in the two current parties...
But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?
Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.
Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.
But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?
Bush: +$4.9T Obama: +$9.3T Trump 1: +$7.8T Biden: +$8.5T Trump 2: +$4.4T
I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt. The point is that both parties have been irresponsible in different ways, and neither supports the policies necessary to balance the budget: tax increases and cuts to entitlements.
That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.
Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.
Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.
The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.
Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.
Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.
> I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt.
That is correct, because it was the Republicans. Looking at Obama:
* https://www.us-debt-clock.com/presidents
note how his second term is half what his first term was? Perhaps that's because his first term was about dealing with the GFC that occurred under Bush's watch. Obama's second term was about the same (in adjusted/2026 dollars) as Bush's second: it seems the high level of spending that Obama did was (a) to first clean up the GFC mess, and (b) paying for the military adventures kicked of by the GOP.
And notice how Clinton 1 was lower than that of the previous three GOP terms? And how Clinton 2 was even lower? See how under Bush it suddenly jumps?
To a certain extent Trump 1 and Biden had to deal with COVID, so there's some leeway there, but Trump 1 also saw a huge tax cut passed in 2019 (before COVID), so there was going to be deficits under his watch (and, surprise, the tax cuts did not 'pay for themselves'):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act
Trump alone has added a quarter of the total debt that the US currently has—and we're barely through half his second term:
* https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide...
The two parties are not equivalent: one starts wars and gives taxes cuts to the rich, the other does not. Just about every major problem that the US has had to deal with over the last few decades has been started under GOP leadership.
I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."
I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.
>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.
I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.
You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.
U popular opinion for sure, and I'm not even saying it as my view today, but there is argument to be made that we don't own anyone a vote and if both parties are terrible options we can walk away and engage elsewhere. If I really believed both parties were bad options, I'd focus on working with my local community as much as possible. If the federal government can't represent me in anyway then I'd be walking out of that system as much as possible.
The Democrats have attempted to pass several anti-gerrymandering bills. One in the Senate in 2024, one in the House in 2021. Both stonewalled by Republicans.
The Republican SCOTUS appointees allowed partisan gerrymandering, the Democratic ones were in the dissent.
California's prop 50 was IN RESPONSE to an unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering effort by Texas at the behest of Trump.
I just picked one example, but I could easily write similar responses that show very stark differences between the parties when it comes to wars, stacking the court, war with Iran, and more.
The difference in many case was that legal challenges in blue stated tended to stop the gerrymandering where courts in red states tended not to. The end result is different, the political intent was not.
I can't include every detail in such a format, but its worth noting that I did clearly call out the Republicans doing it first. Its not like I was saying "democrat gerrymander" out of context there.
> Two wrongs don't make a right.
It is ok to respond to gerrymandering by gerrymandering. It is not kindergarten. The court said it is legal, GOP will continue to do it. If the other side does not engage, they will honorably loose all ability to influence politics.
The CA proposition was put to a vote. Literally direct democracy. The TX legislature had a special session to put this in without voter input.
The CA proposition is time bounded, the TX one is not.
The CA proposition was in reaction to the TX one. If TX did not mid-cycle redistrict I am confident CA wouldn't.
Can you still really claim the two were equivalent?
How have you not seen any of those items discussed? It's all I see.
What I don't see is why my fucking neighbors themselves are more than a vote. Having worked with you all for decades now, I don't find any of you any smarter or fucking competent to be a org leader; what have we done but bitch about what web framework and cloud backend to use and stupid valuations should we run up?
It's all ultimately a huge waste since we can't be sure the meteor doesn't hit Earth after we die; we're all just fucking winging it
My age peers 45-50 are just the next Boomers; overly verbose nitwits jerking off whatever literacy they acquired through education. It's cheesy as fuck stupid primates grasping at straws and throwing emotional poop, arbitrary social fiefdom erecting as a means to engage in gentle math based eugenics of who earned a job on an office gig roster.
Fingers crossed everyone loses. Cause if this is all advanced society is capable of launch the nukes.
Congress hasn't meaningfully acted on the war in Iran. They are the only ones with the power to declare war and emergency powers are clear. They also own the budget and decided to pay for the war after the fact. Yes the Republicans control both houses right now do that doesn't help, but unless I'm wildly mistaken that spending vote was jot a party line vote.
The main wars fought in the past 40 years have all been GOP initiated: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. This have dwarfed the military operations initiated by Dems.
you absolutely do; deficits are not binary -- size matters
Both now have to gerrymander, because one party decided they gerrymander is way to go. And the other one ended up with no choice. Trying to both side this is particularly hypocritical, because one party just finally woke up and realized there is no way to be represented if they dont take countermeasures against past gerrymandering.
Court is already stacked by one party, the other one dropped the ball on that one. And its voters are paying for it. It must stack it back.
And when it comes to debt, the supposed fiscal responsibility party caused more of it.
Was it the Democrats what were in power when going into Afghanistan? When going into Iraq? Were the Democrats in power when Iran was attacked?
These three conflicts have been the largest cost in terms of American blood and treasure in my lifetime (as a GenXer). And they were not started by Democrats.
The fact that the Democrats had to deal with them once they (e.g.) got into the White House is not the same the Democrats being responsible for them.
On the two former wars, there were Republicans in the White House but, until Iran, they have never been the ones to declare war. Congress declares war, and multiple Congressional groups are briefed on the same confidential details the President should be using to recommend a declaration of war.
I don't say that to excuse those presidents and vice presidents, only to point out that all of Congress was involved and both wars were strongly supported by congressional votes.
This is a misunderstanding of how "tax cuts" work under the US income tax. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Notice the lack of "tax cuts". GDP goes up, taxes go up by exactly the same amount. The number from the most recent year is basically the same as the number from 50 years prior in 1975. Ratio hasn't changed meaningfully since the end of WWII. But Congress somehow keeps passing "tax cuts", so how does that work?
It's because the tax cuts are fake. They set the tax brackets in dollars rather than percentiles, but the tax rates are in percentages, so that's not a stable ratio. In 1995 the median household income was $34,080, now it's $87,460. If they left the tax brackets the same, it would shove the middle class into the tax brackets meant for the rich. De facto middle class tax hike whenever they do nothing.
Naturally Congress loves this, because every few years they get to pass a bill re-adjusting the numbers to keep the true tax rate the same while calling it a "tax cut", and thereby get to claim credit for something people want while not really changing anything. Which is their absolute favorite thing, and why they never fix it by setting the tax brackets in percentiles.
This was the "Locked Box" that Al Gore got mocked for on SNL 26 years ago. So people saw it coming and were trying to fix it then. And it was the Democrats trying to fix, it is not a "both sides" case. There is one party trying to destroy Social Security, and one party trying to fix it. I encourage anyone to not take my word for it, and conduct some basic research of their own.
Anyway, the crisis is that there is less income than distribution. So we collect debt (unlikely, given appetite for US debt after the last 20 months or so) or reduce payments.
Since many social security recipients are wealthy and not at risk of poverty, what will happen is likely some sort of reduction after means testing. It is not ideal, but entirely because fiscal choices of America's collective fault.
why is fiscal responsibility an issue for social security, beyond governments stealing from it?
how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?
It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.
The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.
When Social Security was created in the 40's, the ratio of workers paying taxes to beneficiaries was like 40:1. So, each worker originally paid a very share amount.
Today, owing to demographic factors, that number is 3:1. Soon it will be 2:1. So by 203X, that number will drop below 1:1, meaning the program will be paying out more money than it takes in. It's at that point that the program will be considered "broke", because it can't meet its obligations.
So there's any number of solutions, which mostly boil down to some combination of the following: Raise SS taxes, cut benefits, or delay benefits (ie later retirement age)
You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.