You’d Have to Eliminate 100% of Discretionary Spending to Halt the National Debt | Hacker News Reader

You’d Have to Eliminate 100% of Discretionary Spending to Halt the National Debt

thesoundingline.com

15 pointsFour_Star7 comments

How much tax income would be gained by eliminating 100% of the current loopholes and deductions?

It's because of loopholes and deductions that Buffet has a lower tax rate than his secretary. Let's get rid of those.

I don't think that is possible without creating new loopholes elsewhere.

> I don't think that is possible without creating new loopholes elsewhere.

It's totally possible, especially if the tax code is simplified and different mechanisms are used to incentivize behavior. Many loopholes are side-effect of complexity, and many of the others were deliberately created to benefit some group or other. Both of those are solvable without creating more loopholes.

No, you could also raise taxes or cut non-discretionary spending.

Non-discretionary spending is mandatory spending, aka entitlement spending. Implied in the name 'non-discretionary' is that you can't just cut it without major entitlement reform.

The point of the article is that without that entitlement reform it's very hard to balance the budget, even with 100% taxes on the 1%.

What about raising taxes on more than the top 1%? How much would we need to raise taxes on people making more than 100k? What about more than 80k?

If you want to balance the budget without reducing spending, then you need to raise an extra 40% of the current revenue.

This page (https://taxfoundation.org/summary-federal-income-tax-data-20...) shows the fraction of existing income tax revenue supplied by the various income quantiles (top 1% -> 39%, 5%-1% -> 20.5%, etc).

So, if we double the revenue extracted from the 1%, we approximately meet our goal.

If we double the revenue extracted from the rest of the top 5%, it only gets us half way there. (And they would then be spending half of their income on taxes)

If we increase by 150% the amounts extracted from both groups, we're 3/4 of the way there.

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