because it's not? revenue was reduced a ton by the 2017 tax scam. The number one sign of a weak nation state is the inability to collect taxes from their elites.
I love how when people talk about making America Great Again they are generally talking about a time where the highest marginal tax rate was like 70% (of course no one paid that but people don't pay the top rate now either). I would love to bring that piece of history back. I love America and have benefitted a lot from it, I'm happy to pay more for my fellow Americans (which I do now via some donations but I need to do more)
People pay much more of the theoretical top rate today than they did of the higher top rate back then. Federal tax revenues as a percentage of GDP has been basically flat since 1950: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S.
“Contrary to common perceptions, the CBO data indicate that: (1) income earned after taxes and transfers has increased over the past several decades for all income groups, (2) the federal tax system is progressive and has become more progressive over the past three decades, and (3) the federal system relies heavily on higher earners to raise revenue for government services and means-tested transfers.”
Also I want to point out that a significant chunk of the "increasingly progressive" nature is driven by increases in income inequality over that same timeframe. Both pre and post tax income even for higher earners has increased (as a percentage rate) much much faster than lower earner so anything other than "increasingly progressive" would be an absurdity.
Not saying I entirely disagree with it. I just don't think that data is that compelling since it's a pretty shallow analysis of taxation and income of high earners (which is fine, not every article needs to be that deep)
The data starts at 1979, before Reagan’s major tax reform in 1986: “In contrast, the effective federal tax rate for the top 1 percent has remained relatively high over this period, ranging between 25 and 35 percent since 1979.”
Reagan’s tax reform wasn’t a gimmick: it broadened the tax base (to encompass more kinds of income) and lowered rate to keep the effective tax rate basically the same.
The biggest problem is we simply doesn’t tax enough. We want to grow the scope of our government to be more like Europe, but we aren’t willing to tax the middle and upper middle class the way they do in Europe. We had an au pair from Germany. Our effective tax rate in a blue state as a dual income professional couple was the same as she paid at her entry level office job.
I contend that taxing higher earned incomes at higher and higher rates is not progressive. Real wealth is made via appreciation in property prices, and those mostly detractive and rent seeking members of society are the least taxed.
Since WW2, US tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has never left the range of of 13-20%, and spent a lot of time in a much tighter cluster of 16-17%. [1]
This time span covers top marginal tax rates from as high as 90% to as low as 35%. The truth here is that we cannot significantly increase tax revenues by raising tax rates, as when taxes get too high, people are simply incentivized to earn less, or to spend more on finding, developing, or exploiting loopholes in the tax code to reduce their taxes. Accordingly, actual economists have understood for the last 50 years that simply raising taxes blindly can counterintuitively decrease overall tax revenue. This effect is part of what's referred to as the Laffer Curve. [2]
But to your first point, that there is no problem, I'd like to point out that interest spending has exceeded defense spending. [3]
But hey, don't take my word for that constituting a problem, take it from Jerome Powell, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve:
"The U.S. federal government’s on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s at all controversial." [4]
In summary:
• No, everything is not perfectly fine. The United States is on a fiscally unsustainable path.
• No, the TCJA is not the big proximal contributor to the problem, routine deficit spending resulting in unsustainable debt is.
• No, we can't easily fix the problem by raising taxes on everyone, let alone by only raising them on the rich.
I find the appeals to authority unconvincing, especially in light of there being other models concerning taxation like modern monetary theory. It leaves yet more confounding variables uncontrolled for and makes policy decisions based on only one perspective feel myopic at best.
what you call an ‘appeal to authority’ is what some of would call a “citation” - feel free to post citations to the evidence you feel supports your argument.
What you call a citation I call chicken bone divination. Just because economists believe in technical analysis doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to buy into their scam. Chiropractors are still frauds despite insurance companies going along with their scam.
To clarify, it sounds like you're just arguing against the validity of the Laffer Curve, not of the integrity or accuracy of Federal Reseve data, or of Jerome Powell's speech?
If this is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.
Also, what is your takeaway from this, after discounting the validity of the Laffer Curve, that the US as a whole ought to simply enact dramatic tax hikes, which will solve fiscal stability issues?
I'll contest the applicability of the Laffer curve (really, Rolle's lemma for anyone who's taken real analysis) to any public finance model approaching what we actually operate in. Public finance is plainly way, way more involved than the effects of one marginal tax rate in isolation.
That's before we get into the (lack of?) empirical data. I'm finding it hard to come up with any citations that offer an existence proof of a Laffer curve for real, actual public finance systems. The Cato Institute and Brookings have things to say, but they're encumbered by policy goals. Ebrill, also encumbered by policy goals near as I can tell, urges caution. Espanhol's master's thesis concludes that a Laffer curve doesn't exist in its investigation of corporate tax rates across the Eurozone.
So, frankly, I'm keener just to throw out the academics here.
That's also before we get into what debt is and how it works. It isn't a call option: the persons, fictitious and natural, to whom the US government is indebted cannot exercise those debts on a whim in an effort to get paid. They have a maturity schedule. What matters to these creditors (and all creditors more broadly) is that there's faith that their debt instruments will eventually fully mature. For natural persons, that's likely decades from now. For fictitious persons like governments, that could very well be on the order of centuries.
It's for this reason why I also reject the appeal to Jerome Powell's authority: he doesn't express a concrete reason why he expects the faith that those persons, fictious and natural, have in the federal government to erode to the point where default is some notion of imminent. Does he expect the executive branch to stop payments suddenly? Does he expect that the tax base will collapse in the very near future? (Malthusians in particular are fond of crying the latter, predicting widespread famine.)
Furthermore, that's all before we get into taxation and how it works. It's a sticky subject academically, even after you peel away the conflicting policy goals. Is taxation revenue? Is it a constraint on the money supply? Is it economic dead weight? The answer to all of these is, "It really depends." One model says one thing, and another says something else, and there isn't a whole lot of real consensus on which one fits best where. (Economics, it turns out, is one of those social sciences, which means that most experimentation is thorny unless you abandon ethics. When all you have is models...)
The thing that matters at the end of the day is that someone (maybe you!) will cheerfully accept my greenbacks for what I reasonably feel like they're worth, and as long as that remains the case, I'll happily render unto Caesar until we finally find a way to kill him for good.