Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

But again (as I said below and was completely unfairly downvoted) we have no way to raise that much money to pay the seniors. Because Tax revenue tends to stay consistent as a % of GDP(http://tinyurl.com/3dgkupq) even when the top tax rate is raised to 80 or 90% (which it was in the 50s).

So the person who really owns America is whoever is going to lend us the money to pay the seniors (and those becoming seniors) in the next 30 or so years.

(And yes I'm prepared to be Downvoted here too but I'd rather be downvoted while trying to get people to face an obvious truth than hide from a bully with a quick mouse finger)

View on HN

You won't be downvoted because what you say is true. It's going to be very challenging to pay for all of these entitlement programs.

We've essentially outsourced to the government what for millennia has been taken care of by families- caring for our seniors and elderly. If we want to have a sustainable path forward, this is something that we as a society will eventually have to confront, come to terms with, and hopefully solve.

Did you read your own chart? Between 1942 and today, it ranges from ~14% to ~21%. I don't know if you're aware of this, but 7% of GDP is a big deal. Incidentally, the same chart you point to shows how tax income is about as low of a share of GDP as its ever been since 1950.

I've seen the same point made elsewhere, and the point isn't really that tax revenue stays constant as a % of GDP, it's that there seems to be a ceiling around 20%. The implication being that attempts to raise tax revenue greater than 20% of GDP are likely to fail.

And the people implying this are usually anti-government nuts.

The fact is tax increases of any kind are currently hard to get. Maybe as benefits for seniors start disappearing we'll see that change since seniors vote. If we ever get back to 20% of GDP for Federal tax revenues there's no special reasoning that says getting to 21% is going to be any harder then going from 18% to 19%. The whole 20% thing is just silly.

Did you see the chart? That's what the empirical data shows. Tax avoidance behavior increases as tax rates increase, you have moving targets.

"Did you see the chart? That's what the empirical data shows."

It doesn't show any such thing. The whole truth is that from 1940 to 2000 average taxes paid including state and local went from 18% to 32%. Plenty of governments around the world and a number of US states are over 20% in federal taxes alone.

"Tax avoidance behavior increases as tax rates increase, you have moving targets."

This is obvious but, unfortunately, does not get you to "it's impossible to collect more then 20% federal taxes"

The seniors will get less than they expect, and that's the sad truth of it.

You assume we have to pay the seniors.

Social security and medicare are both insurance funds. You pay in now to get benefits later.

The current generation of seniors going into retirement spent all their retirement before they retired. They elected the politicians who bankrupted social security through generous tax cuts and costly wars.

The solution isn't an end to social security. The solution is a temporary reduction in benefits for the baby boomers.

That would be fiscal responsibility.

For those fellow readers with a distaste for obfuscated links: http://www.businessinsider.com/government-tax-receipts-by-so...

I down-voted you here because this is a dupe of what you just posted lower down in this very thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com