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Highly recommend anyone who cares about this to do the CRFB’s Debt Fixer: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer

In this simulation you have to make choices to bring debt to 100% of GDP by 2034. For the most part you learn that discretionary spending is largely irrelevant though has modest room for improvement in military/federal employee benefits, payroll tax rate needs to go up and probably apply to all income, most of the TCJA needs to expire, and Medicare needs to be more efficient. Which all hit politically important constituencies in different ways so nothing will get done. Obama should have done the deal with Boehner and there would have been fewer hard choices to make!

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Or you can apply taxes to corporations and the ultra-wealthy and drop the debt easily while expanding medicare, social security benefits, college, etc. The counter-point of "then all the companies will leave" seems unlikely considering the wealth of natural resources and high quality of living that the US offers.

We haven't really tried fixing the wealth gap since the Great Depression, so maybe it's time to give it another go.

The incidence of corporate taxes on the average American is hotly debated but it’s definitely well above 0.

Confiscating 100% of the ultra wealthy’s wealth would—for any reasonable definition of “ultra wealthy”—perhaps fund the government for a year or two.

Probably like 6 months, maybe. I agree with the premise of your point.

But if you took just one billion dollars from Jeff Bezos you could give a million dollars to every American. I've been told such things many times.

I know this is in jest, but it might be the root of the problem; a lot of folks don't have a good grasp on basic math, especially with large numbers, and fall victim to this kind of thinking.

One way to think about this silly math in reverse:

Split-adjusted, Amazon IPO’d at $0.075 a share. If instead of raiding my $3 piece of Jeff’s billion, I had the good sense to give him that pittance 25 years ago, it’d be worth $7,400 today.

But if you leave $1b to Bezos, which is a pretty good retirement fund, you can give $500 to every American.

> The counter-point of "then all the companies will leave"

I don’t know why people don’t apply the same logic to people. The US is a highly competitive economy because of immigrants because it is a nice place to live. If that changes because of declines in living standards, it will be harder for those big companies to attract top talent in the US.

You can do that exactly once. Because after that - you won’t have any new startups, new companies, new wealthy people, nothing. Nobody will start any venture knowing the government is greedily waiting to confiscate it all.

Investors will redirect their funds to friendlier jurisdictions. And entrepreneurs will go there too.

One the reasons European entrepreneurs go to the USA to start startups is exactly because the USA did not try this kind of shenanigans, while their native countries did.

As Margaret Thatcher said: “The problem with socialism is that at some point you run out of other people's money”.

"There is no such thing as society."

- Margaret Thatcher.

Always odd when people quote Thatcher as if she was some kind of economic genius, rather than the architect of record unemployment, decline in manufacturing, record inequality and homelessness - all of which ought to sound familiar to Americans.

Socialism still failed everywhere it was tried while free markets are invariably lifting nations out of poverty. Mrs Thatcher was smart enough to recognize that, no matter what her other failings were.

It would be nice if people were more embarrassed at not knowing what the words they use actually mean.

Countries with strong social safety nets, like Scandinavia, have some of the highest standards of living, longest life expectancies, and happiest populations in the world. That's Democratic socialism.

Neoliberalism hasn't "lifted nations out of poverty", it's increased inequality and instability for decades. If you remove China from the stats this is startlingly clear - and China is hardly pure capitalism/a free market.

And meanwhile, the planet is burning, we're losing species at extinction rates not far off asteroid levels, we've put plastic and PFAS into the entire biosphere making even rainwater unsafe to drink, etc.

> Mrs Thatcher was smart enough to recognize that

Thatcher increased poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Saying otherwise requires incredible delusion.

> Scandinavia

Which country exactly? Oil-rich Norway has about 5 million people and is basically a democratic Saudi Arabia. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA - quite far from the egalitarian society socialists dream about. And they all have strong capitalist economies, with multinational corporations and such.

> China

China enjoyed unprecedented growth when they decided to allow capitalism and free markets. Conversely that growth slowed and problems starting to appear when scared of the entrepreneurs success, Xi decided to reign them in.

Other A/B tests abound: Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, etc. My favorite is where I live, Eastern Europe. We were starving until we got rid of our socialist economies in the 90s and how we enjoy what is basically a luxury lifestyle: flights, cars, iPhones, city breaks and vacations in Greece.

> planet is burning

Do you think communist countries cared about the environment? They polluted even more. Read up on the Aral sea sometimes. Mao killed all the sparrows to such an extent they had to import new ones. Caring about nature is a luxury only rich people can afford. And only under capitalism people are allowed to create value and enrich themselves.

> Oil-rich Norway

Who owns the oil Nick?

> Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA - quite far from the egalitarian society socialists dream about.

Sweden is regarded as one of the most egalitarian societies in the world.

> China enjoyed unprecedented growth when they decided to allow capitalism and free markets

Did the government retain significant control of the economy during that time?

> Other A/B tests abound: Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

All countries which have been the victim of horrific sanctions and interference by the US, lest they prove that socialism can actually work.

> Caring about nature is a luxury only rich people can afford. And only under capitalism people are allowed to create value and enrich themselves.

Lol, some people really just buy anything.. This is tiresome. Believe what you like.

> some people really just buy anything.. This is tiresome. Believe what you like.

I actually lived under both systems so at least I can speak from my experience. I learned on my own skin which one I'd "buy". I am willing to bet you've never lived in any of those socialist paradises you admire. Give it a try please and then come back and give us economy lessons.

Yeah, it's quite funny that people think the corporations will just leave if you make them pay tax.

They still want access to our consumers, they still want access to the talent our universities produce, they still want the stability our economy provides, they still want to transact with the currency our military backs.

Tell them that if they want access to all that, they can pay their fair share of what it takes to provide all that.

The actual counter-point is that history shows us the exact opposite of what you propose will happen. "Higher tax = more money for our efficient government" is incredibly simplistic and ignorant thinking.

The fact is that lower tax rates actually result in higher tax revenue. https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/benefits-of-a...

Lowering corporate tax rates is just a race to the bottom.

Look at Apple paying an effective 1% tax rate on all European profits, just because some sneaky bois in Ireland decided that would be 'good for the economy'.

Was it good for Ireland? A little, though our reputation has suffered.

Was it good for Irish politicians? Have no doubt.

Was it good for Europe? Fuck no.

Was it good? Fuck no.

"lowering" doesn't mean having the lowest rate in a race to the bottom. Putting it back to 35% would put us as top 5 in the world. And for what? We have the data. This is a settled point. Tax revenue goes down and entire industries die and move away. Because yes, corporations will maximize their profits by any means.

Folks seriously believe having one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world will have a positive effect are dreaming. Don't strawman with Ireland.

> "lowering" doesn't mean having the lowest rate in a race to the bottom.

The world has seen tax rates lowered in a race to the bottom.

> Putting it back to 35% would put us as top 5 in the world.

See above.

> We have the data. This is a settled point. Tax revenue goes down and entire industries die and move away.

First off, no. Empirical evidence on the impact of lowering corporate tax rates shows mixed results. Implementation is key.

We've been in a well documented race to the bottom for about 50 years. We've been ignoring potential solutions like capital controls, sabotaging tax harmonization and international cooperation, and taking away the ability of the IRS to chase big fish.

American industry died because corporations chose to move their manufacturing to the places that were most willing to exploit their workers, with the backing of the same corporate-sponsored politicians cutting tax rates.

'The problem with neoliberalism is that sooner or later you run out of public goods to strip mine for temporary profits.'

> Folks seriously believe having one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world will have a positive effect are dreaming.

From 1952 to 1963 the corporate tax rate in the US was 52%, with the highest tax band set at 91%. The period and the years afterward were characterized by massive growth and decreases in inequality.

You could call it the heyday of the American Dream, when upward mobility was at a peak.

> Don't strawman with Ireland.

Ireland illustrates the point perfectly. Apple moved there so they could pay <1% tax across all Europe in a secretive sweetheart deal, and Ireland didn't even benefit all that much. Tax harmonization put an end to it. All very relevant and not at all straw, unless you're coming in with a hard bias...

I think it's more that you will have no economic growth. The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes, while making around 25% of the income, and raising the corporation tax lowers the income tax by a lesser amount since they often tax the same money.

> We haven't really tried fixing the wealth gap since the Great Depression, so maybe it's time to give it another go.

If you look at a graph of the percent of wealth held by the 1%, most of them start in 1979 to show an ever increasing trend. But if you look at a longer graph, you will see a larger U shape over the last century, with a higher peak pre-great depression than today.

> The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes,

No, they don't. There are enough mechanisms in the tax code that many of the ultra wealthy pay nothing close to this, or anything at all. Buffet has famously complained about this.

It works if you ignore FICA completely (which is weird because it's like 30-40% of tax collected or something), and round 45% up to 50%.

If you include FICA, it's more like the top 1% of income people pay ~30% of total tax (somewhere around there).

The top 1% also 'earn' >20% of all income, and hold over 30% of all wealth.

The bottom 50% of Americans own less than 3% of all wealth.

I really think that these figures need to start taking into account disposable income, so we can see just how fucking evil this situation really is. There's over 8 million hungry kids in the wealthiest country on the planet. Half a million families file for bankruptcy every year due to medical debt. Etc.

And people are arguing in all seriousness that we need to tax corporations and the wealthy even less, quoting Thatcher and cherry-picking misleading stats. Ugh.

Also, 25% of federal expenditures are funded by printing money, which is just a tax more like fica than income tax.

Of course the other way of looking at it is that fica ultimately just comes out of the pocket of the rich. If there were no payroll taxes, fica would just stay in the employers pockets. Employers are mostly the rich. Or may be it would get embezzled by the middle management due to increased principal agent problem without the payroll tax paper trail…

FICA is capped. Past about $160k, you pay no additional Social Security; past about $180k you pay no additional Medicare tax. So if you earn $1 million a year, you pay a lower percentage of your income in FICA than if you earn $100k.

So if I understood you correctly, yes, the rich pay a higher percentage of taxes if you ignore FICA, because the poor and middle class pay a much higher percentage of FICA.

Pretty much, yea.

Pedantically, only the social security part of FICA is capped. Medicare you still pay 1.45-2.35%, uncapped. But the 6.2% for social security is capped, and thus for the top end of the 1% ends up being a miniscule tax.

If you get rid of the social security cap, get rid of mortgage interest deduction, and add a wealth tax, that more or less solves the 2034 debt to <100% of GDP right there.

Huh. I thought that Medicare had a cap, too, just a higher one.

Also note that FICA is only on "earned income" (not interest, dividends, capital gains, rental income...), and is not subject to the standard deductions.

I believe the post you replied to is referring to the total share of Federal income taxes collected paid by the percentile of returns.

i.e. the top 1% of tax filers by income paid nearly 50% of all taxes collected.

This is accurate per the latest statistics released by the IRS, for tax year 2021; the top 1% of returns paid 45.78% of all taxes collected.

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...

Another link with the same data in a table:

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

It's funny. If you had 100 people in a room, there's one guy paying for about 45 people. And the next 4 people are paying for about 5 people each (20 total). And the lowest paid 50 people combined are paying for about 2 people total.

I think we should just not have the bottom half of income earners in the US pay any taxes. It wouldn't change the numbers much, and then it would be one less thing for them to complain about.

However, I don't expect anyone to put down their torches and pitch forks any time soon. It's too easy to use this to get people spun up, even above average educated people as in this forum.

That data is not adjusted for wealth transfers and other social programs. If you do make the adjustment, you will find that a majority of Americans are not net taxpayers at all. That number may be as high as 60%. The data on this is obfuscated by having 10000 different programs partly so you can't see what the real distribution of federal revenue is like.

Some people are negative of I think, so its not an perfect example

Those 50 under-paid and exploited people own just ~3% of all the wealth in the room, even though they're doing about 30% of the work.

Where does the vast, vast majority of the value of their work go? It goes to the asset class - the top 1 or 2 people.

And you call the top guy generous because he pays ~40% tax on the money the bottom 90% made for him.

Even as he buys politicians, runs monopolies, subsidizes fossil fuel, and strip mines the planet for even more.

Don't make out like the 50% of people making 2 or 3% of income are just ungrateful, or bad at math. The insane level of inequality in America is literally an existential threat to humanity.

I think the classic example is people taking out loans against their paper wealth. No taxes paid on the loan of course, and no capital gains as nothing was realized as a gain.

The fact that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary means nothing about his share of total tax revenue. A lot of people in the US who want Euro-style benefits don't realize that means extending our highest tax rates down to the actual middle class (which is what happens in Europe). Despite the loopholes, the lion's share of total tax revenue still comes from the top.

They should let you draw a line: the federal income tax rate as a function of income. I saw some options for repealing recent tax cuts, but I want to go back to the tax rates of the 1950s.

Actually it would be neat to make something like that - anyone know where to get very detailed data on distribution of incomes? A quick search and I only see fairly course bins. I think this would need a lot of detail, especially at the high outliers.

Almost no one paid these predatory marginal rates. People respond to incentives.

> Data from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget show that federal income tax receipts as a percentage of GDP have fluctuated between 5.6 percent and 9.9 percent since 1950, despite dramatic changes in the top marginal income tax rate.

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/01/09/fact-check-90-percent-t...

"almost no one" is consistent with the ultra-high income earners (e.g. top 10,000).

This article sites Piketty and Saez, "the top 0.01 percent paid an average total federal tax rate of 71.4 percent in 1960 compared to 34.7 percent in 2004".

Okay, 71.4% is not %90, but still pretty high.

People dreaming of going back to Leave It To Beaver times might want to rethink that.

This was significantly more informative than the video.

It really depends how good the forecasts on a wealth tax will be. After all, that stuff is based on inflated asset values that are unusual compared to the rest of the world.

If you believe that our medical spending is unusual here, then you should also believe that our asset values are unusual. You can't pick and choose what is unusual, if all you're doing is comparing to the rest of the world.

Without that wealth tax, does it make sense to limit the mission of many of these programs? For example, the military has a constantly expanding mission, and much of that mission is domestic welfare, do we want to cap that?

Overall it is very enlightening. You will never be the CEO of a giant corporation, and you are basically never the beneficiary of its wealth. You don't need to give a big tax handout to Apple and Google. Seems easy to deal with.

The funny thing is that if the US actually reduced its debt by that much it would be a big problem for financial markets because investors like to hold US securities. The interest rate would go down because supply would be less then demand. The US has too much debt but cutting the debt drastically would have knock on effects on our financial system. Maybe create an asset bubble? I don't know.

This is a fun game. Thank you for linking it. I just did one run-through to see what it’s like but now that I know what some of the later choices are I might adjust some of my earlier answers.

I fixed the budget by saving $13,350B dollars relative to current law. Debt would be down to 84% of GDP by 2034 and 35% in 2050.

Honestly, this game didn't let me make as deep of cuts to social security and medicare as I would have liked. The reason this game has you make difficult choices in other areas is because you can't do things like "raise retirement age for unconditional benefits to 80" or "means-test all retirement benefits." The class of people that is drawing money out of social security and Medicare (old Americans) is the richest group of people ever in history. I have no interest in continuing to funnel money from the poor to the rich.

It seems to be limited to actual proposals made under the last two Presidential administrations. Even under that criteria I couldn’t tell you if it grabbed everything, but I feel you. There’s no granularity like privatizing Social Security, eliminating tax incentives for employer-based health plans, reclassifying specific pharmaceuticals so you don’t need to go through a doctor who sends you through a behind-the-counter pharmacy, etc.

It has a scope, but I think within that scope it offers enough granularity with just actual proposals and laws that were proposed or passed under the last two administrations to give you some clue into what’s possible; which is why I like it because even with that, it is possible to achieve the goal.

Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it.

When I have heard discussion of paid leave, it's always been "mandate companies provide it", not "federal government pays a stipend".

In "Build and support affordable housing", it lists a large increase in debt. Does that calculation take into account likely savings for local and state entities and hospitals?

I get it's a federal calculator, but it feels somewhat myopic.

I guess the same could be said by a military hawk, who may assert "Sure, cut spending by $450B in ten years, but World War 3 will cost $10T!"

> Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it.

This vaguely reminds me of that classic "Americans will eventually do the right thing after thoroughly exploring all the alternatives" quote. The issue, at the highest level, is that the political process has agreed how much redistribution needs to happen and how much taxation is reasonable. The two numbers don't match, the situation is impossible to sustain and needs to be renegotiated - either more taxation or less redistributing.

It doesn't really matter if the redistributing is officially handled via the government or forced to happen as a direct payment from taxee to welfare recipient. That is still settling the negotiation by saying that the taxpayers need to pay more.

It is a little less administratively efficient to officially route it through the government but frankly I think that is a better idea. The US political consensus seems to be heading towards "we'll settle this by raising taxes, but we'll do it through payroll, inflation and corporate tax to try and disguise who is paying". That is a lousy strategy that will result in people getting poorer, not understanding why and lashing out randomly because they can sense at some level that they are worse off.

> It is a little less administratively efficient to officially route it through the government but frankly I think that is a better idea.

It is massively more efficient at a macro level for the government to handle it, than to make every single employer manage it redundantly and often poorly. The SSA already handles payments to millions of Americans monthly with low operational overhead. Have them send out these and other safety net checks, and if you want to means test it, claw it back from high earners after the fact at tax return time.

> This vaguely reminds me of that classic "Americans will eventually do the right thing after thoroughly exploring all the alternatives" quote.

Apparently this quote originates from another quote that didn't refer to any specific country.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...

Highly recommend anyone who cares about this to recognize that it's easy to "fix the debt" in the Debt Fixer just by raising taxes.

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