[KhanMahGretsch]

At the risk of sounding glib, I can offer Mr. Gates >220 trillion reasons why increased taxes won’t necessarily improve the fiscal solvency of the United States, in and of itself.

Debt and un-funded liabilities are staggering, and it’s politically unviable to implement plans to reduce that (although lip-service is paid), IMO.

I’d like to hear more about how those taxes would be spent.

[RobLach]

I personally feel that taxation shouldn't even be that debatable in the legislature.

How it should be is just covering the cost of a moving-average window for the previous x amount of years of spending mapping according to a integration across income.

It's nonsensically inefficient to debate on taxation without consideration of spending, and vice versa.

[dragonwriter]

> How it should be is just covering the cost of a moving-average window for the previous x amount of years of spending mapping according to a integration across income.

No, it shouldn't. If you wanted to target a balanced budget that wouldn't work, and I don't know why you would want to target perpetual deficits as a locked-in rule.

> It's nonsensically inefficient to debate on taxation without consideration of spending, and vice versa.

Whether or not a bill included mandates on both sides, IME, it's very rare for either spending it taxed to be debated without consideration (even if the quality is poor) of the other.

[RobLach]

You can explicitly budget in a surplus target.

[KhanMahGretsch]

>covering the cost of a moving-average window for the previous x amount of years of spending

In principle, I like the concept of anchoring taxation to spending, because it could mitigate the political viability of spending what we don't have by making the pain immediate.

How would you integrate welfare, tax-credits, healthcare, and other federally-funded entitlements into this solution? How can we avoid a large (well, larger) schism between these groups, in the short-term, keeping in mind that we obviously want to increase mobility from that group into the tax-paying group?

[toast0]

In the proposed system, I would imagine Social Security and Medicare should generally operate separately from income taxes, but if the revenue from their specific taxes isn't enough for their spending, taxes would be adjusted up by default. Congressional action could adjust benefits down or transfer money from the general fund.

Welfare, tax credits, and healthcare (outside of Medicare) is all spending, paid for by the general fund. The proposal is to automatically adjust taxes to match.

[KhanMahGretsch]

How does this not create a voting blocs among those who pay income taxes (incentivised for less spending), and those who rely on public-welfare (incentivised for more spending)?

There is much evidence to suggest that it is, under current circumstances, extremely difficult for those on welfare to move back into gainful employment, especially across inter-generational timescales.

Without ever-increasing growth in the economy (a requirement much-derided by detractors of the free-market system), the liabilities would grow more expensive over time; as would taxes; as would the population reliant on said-entitlements. And with less people having disposable income, that would lead to even-less growth, right?

I understand that such analysis is, in general, anathema to the HN audience, but I'd love to hear some solutions to that riddle.

[toast0]

Don't we already have that conflict? Automating the revenue portion shouldn't change the overall dynamics that much; there just might be less deficit spending. Although, unless it's an amendment, Congress is going to break the rules at times, that's what they do.