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.
Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend.
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.
So lets raise taxes now and pay it off. Who should we tax? Should we squeeze blood from stones and try to get the poor to pay more taxes, or should we tax the wealthy?
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.
You can’t tax the rich enough to pay off the debt. They already pay the overwhelming majority of taxes.
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.
> You can’t tax the rich enough to pay off the debt. They already pay the overwhelming majority of taxes.
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.
>Yes. This means that if we double the taxes on the wealthy we will roughly double our total taxes collected. A neat trick.
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
It will probably have to look something like western Europe with massive across the board tax increases. I make $60k a year in the USA and my tax rates are about 12%, with no VAT. They'd probably need to look more like France, where a $60k income is hit with a 42% effective tax (adjusted for progressive rates) before 20% VAT is paid at the store.
vat is simply corporate income tax, it's a tax on "value added", i.e. profit or income. I don't know in europe whether that is on top of other corporate income tax or not.
The BBB increased the QSBS exclusion and gross asset value limit by 50% and quadrupled the SALT deduction, among other things. I guess you could argue the meaning of "for the wealthy" here, but it would be hard to do in good faith.
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.
The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.
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.
You see those who have survived the job, not those who don’t. Have you ever asked your father about people he’s worked with who are now dead? Probably a whole lot of em.
> You see those who have survived the job, not those who don’t.
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.
Interesting that the current President is 79 years old (and will be 82 by the end of his term) and he took over from someone who was also 82 at the end of their term.
Given that, software work at 67 should be well within cognitive limits.
They have lots of supporting staff, mostly younger than themselves, to do the heavy lifting. Some politicians developing dementia while holding office must practically be puppeteered through term by their staff. See https://theintercept.com/2023/09/12/national-security-dement...
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.
The debt has ballooned because massive tax cuts have been given to the already ultra-wealthy.
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.
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?