If spending is not out of control then how do we square that with nearing 2 trillion in debt added each year?
Is there a trick that makes that state of affairs sustainable?
We spend a _lot_ on defense, social security, and medicare/medicaid (which I believe are all allocated as part of congressional laws, and not part of the discretionary budget).
Maybe if corporations and the richest tax bracket actually paid their fair share of taxes, it would be fine? Instead the Republican congress has historically gone with _tax cuts_ for the wealthiest instead.
[1]: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail_2...
[2]: https://usafacts.org/articles/this-chart-tells-you-everythin...
If you inflation-adjust my income backwards to 1990 so it's apples to apples, and then estimate my federal tax burden using the same scenario, it's approaching double. About 15%. Americans, despite all the moaning (from which I'm not immune) are undertaxed by just about every standard. If Americans were taxed at 1990 standards, based on my quick estimation, we'd close the deficit almost completely, or even produce a surplus.
As you can imagine, "I'll double your taxes" is not a winning campaign promise.
Here is an interesting paper (pdf warning) which on page 49 shows a very good visual of just how progressive the US tax system is compared to both Eastern and Western Europe. In Europe, the tax burden is much more evenly distributed across incomes.
https://wid.world/document/why-is-europe-more-equal-than-the...
If you'd like to not bother with the the pdf, here's the image directly.
What were the top-line tax rates in the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010s, and now?
What did the distribution if incomes look like between the richest and poorest in each of those decades.
We've continually cut taxes on the wealthiest in society, allowing them to get ever richer. The poor have continued to get poorer, and have less and less to contribute in tax revenue.
Spending is flat, revenue goes down, deficit goes up. It's pretty simple math.
The state of affairs is not sustainable, but the solution is not gutting spending (there are, I'm sure, areas that could be trimmed), but rather returning to tax rates and policies that we had in the past, along with some bonus-taxes to reduce the extreme income-inequality that we currently have.
So, if you want fiscal sustainability:
- tax the ever-living-fuck out of the billionaire class
- increase taxes significantly on the multi-millionaire class
- increase taxes moderately on the millionaire-class
- significantly increase estate taxes, especially on estates worth >$1B
Maintain that for a couple of decades, then slowly and slightly relax the top-line tax rates.
If someone is selling you fiscal sustainability without talking about making a billionaire's eyes water, they are just lying to you.
Well, if you look at the revenue vs spending lines, SOMEBODY was paying!
Can you demonstrate that this is what actually occurred? This data from the IRS shows inflation-adjusted revenues increasing in the last two decades.
Think of it this way, let's come up with a pretend nation called Breadland. This nation has a government which issues a currency that we'll call the Dollar. We'll say in 1920, Breadland had 1,000 citizens, who were each taxed at $1/year. Breadland citizens could buy a loaf of bread on the market for $.25/loaf. The government provided citizens 4 loaves of bread each year.
So, the Breadland government brought in $1,000 in revenue in 1920, and it provided each citizens 5 loaves of bread at market cost, so it spent $1,250.
Now, let's jump ahead to 2020. Over 100 years things have changed a bit. It now costs $1 to buy a loaf of bread, and there are 100,000 citizens.
If the Breadland government simply keep its revenues up with inflation, then it would now bring in $4,000 of revenue in 2020. But it has 100 times as many citizens now. So, maybe it would make more sense to see if the tax an individual pays has kept up with inflation. Now each citizen is only paying $0.04 in taxes! Where if the individual payment amount had kept up with inflation, they would be paying $4.
And similarly, if the spending only keeps up with inflation, you can see that the amount of government services will have cratered. Where before the government bought 5 loaves of bread per citizen, now it buys just 1/20th of a loaf of bread per citizen.
Obviously, this is an extreme example to demonstrate the point, but for a nation's gross revenue and spending "inflation-adjusted" is simply the wrong baseline. You should be comparing to something like "inflation-adjusted per capita" spending and revenue, or something that will wash out similar like comparing the spending/revenue as a percentage of GDP.
An easy place to view spending/revenue as a % of GDP is...the article that this discussion is taking place in the context of: https://lbo-news.com/2025/02/16/no-federal-spending-and-empl....
But, let's take a really simple look at spending in 2010, 2000, and 1990. I'm going to use taxfoundation.org as a source, since they're generally opposed to my viewpoints, hopefully you can trust them as a source. Data is here: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/federal-tax-reven...
- 2010 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $2,162,706
- 2000 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $2,025,191
- 1990 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $1,031,958
- 1980 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $517,112
Let's first adjust for inflation. I'm going to adjust everything to 2010 dollars, using the BLS calculator here: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm#
- 2010 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $2,162,706
- 2000 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $2,599,719
- 1990 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $1,755,195
- 1980 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $1,440,250
So, we can see the same increase in inflation adjusted dollars. Let's now make it inflation-adjusted per-capita. I'm going to use US census data from here: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange..., and we'll take the top-line "United States Resident" population.
- 2010 Population 308,745,538
- 2000 Population 281,421,906
- 1990 Population 248,709,873
- 1980 Population 226,545,805
Now we'll simply take the gross revenue, as millions of 2010 dollars, and divide by the population (let's do per-100k instead of literally per-capita, since our revenue figures are in millions of dollars:
- 2010 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $700.48
- 2000 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $923.78
- 1990 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $705.72
- 1980 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $635.74
Does that address your question?
Revenue did indeed decline from 2000 to 2010, but the trend begins to reverse quite immediately after 2010. On page 15 of the 2023 IRS Data Book [0], total reported revenues were:
1980: 519,375,273,000 (in 1980 dollars)
1990: 1,056,365,652,000 (in 1990 dollars)
2000: 2,096,916,925,000 (in 2000 dollars)
2010: 2,345,055,978,000 (in 2010 dollars)
2020: 3,493,067,956,000 (in 2020 dollars)
Adjusted to 2010 dollars using a calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis [1] for sake of comparison:
1980: 1,374,294,904,976 (in 2010 dollars)
1990: 1,762,975,620,417 (in 2010 dollars)
2000: 2,655,315,429,720 (in 2010 dollars)
2010: 2,345,055,978,000 (in 2010 dollars)
2020: 4,145,927,700,959 (in 2010 dollars)
Using the population figures from the census data you provided, this works out to a per capita revenue of:
1980: $6,066.30 (in 2010 dollars)
1990: $7,088.48 (in 2010 dollars)
2000: $9,435.35 (in 2010 dollars)
2010: $7,595.43 (in 2010 dollars)
2020: $12,508.48 (in 2010 dollars)
Note that this trend continues through 2021, 2022, and 2023.
I notice that some of the decreases and increases in revenue seem to correlate with periods of relative economic prosperity (e.g. the height of the dotcom boom around the year 2000) and periods of relative privation (e.g. the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession in 2010). I don't have any insight into whether these macro events have a more substantial impact on revenue collection in comparison to any changes in tax policy that might have occurred during these periods, but it doesn't seem like a coincidence.
[0] - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf
[1] - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
Anyway, Federal taxes are income based at this time and most billionaires do not have income except when they sell an asset for a profit. Billionaires do tend to pay huge amounts in state and local taxes which are used more efficiently anyway. One billionaire leaving a town during covid due to increased tax burden and SALT exemption reduction effectively bankrupted them and the school district.
A baby born 5 seconds ago already inherits 100k in debt which is nothing other than a delayed exponential tax on top of all the other ones he or she will pay in their life. We have to reduce spending by a massive amount to get to fiscal sustainability.
That seems unlikely, given that we can run the country for 6 more months without doing that, which makes me suspect the rest of your revenue and spending analysis.
What I will say is that during covid billionaires expanded greatly. So, the $6.1T that billionaires are worth, would fund 11 months of US spending ($6.9T)
I'm saying we should tax them significantly more than we do now, and we should also tax multi-millionaires a lot more than we do now, and we should focus on reducing the deficit by raising revenues. We don't need to close the gap with all 6.9T in spending, we need to reduce the deficit of $800B.
We should look at raising an addition 200-600B in revenue, putting the burden largely on the backs of the extremely wealthy (and not just billionaires, but if you're in a household making more than half a million dollars a year), by heavily taxing their income, capital gains, and estates. We should look at moderate reductions in our defense spending. With approaches like that we could bring our deficit down into the $100-$200B range, which would be a more reasonable steady state for us.
How does that jive with other countries that have both higher spending and fiscal sustainability?
If you assume that private sector is more productive than public sector, then it makes sens to delay taxation, because GDP growth will be higher.
Same tax/GDP share with debt pays you more with the same money.
The nominal sum growing means nothing. The thing to watch is debt to gdb ratio and debt service cost to gdp ratio.
For New Zealand, in NZD: GDP: 85,933 Tax revenue: 25,185 Expenses: 26,684
On top of that some emergency situations have also contributed (GFC, COVID) and then and in the Iraq war.
Right now they’re proposing a budget that will reduce taxes again, and increase our debt by over $4 trillion.
Edit: seriously everyone here knows math, this is math, it is public data, why is it treated this way. Argue the substance of cutting programs, but you can’t argue that deciding to raise less tax revenue than you spend increases the debt!
Every time the Republicans say these things will pay for themselves, and every time the CBO is like, “uh, no, it’ll cost $X trillion over ten years”.
Everyone ignores them. Now we’re several trillion deep in debt from George W Bush and Trump tax cuts, as predicted by the people who actually know how shit works.
The trick: It’s that US debt is denominated in US dollars, which means the US can always print more money to pay off its debt (that has other consequences like inflation if done too quickly). Secondly the US economy and government has been such that its debt is considered one of if no the “safest” investment.
There is no such thing as a self-funding tax cut.
Doesn't matter how steady the spending is, if the income is cut, you will start going in debt.
Yes, he did. Deficit spending returned with George W Bush, reaching a high with the Global Financial Crisis, was getting back under control until Trump, and then peaked with COVID.
You seem to have misread my comment, I wrote "until", not "under".
Also, it actually increased twice under Obama. The peak before COVID was in FY 2008 (fully under Bush), then it was slightly better in FY 2009 (Bush and Obama), then rose again in FY 2010 (fully Obama), then declined until FY 2016 when it rose again (fully Obama) and continued rising under Trump.
1998-2001 had budget surpluses [0], but despite some quarterly drops, the national debt was generally climbing all through that period. [1]
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
But you can get a lot of data from this site: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/
But yes it’s largely tax cuts. Including cutting taxes while starting that war.
This, it turned out, was a lie. And not a very convincing one to anyone with even half a functioning brain cell.
>A serious problem, if you’re concerned about debt and deficits—I’ll address that some other time—is that, aside from the late 1990s, revenues haven’t kept up with spending since around 1970. They took hits from George W. Bush’s tax cuts after 2001 and from Trump’s after 2017, but the revenue line has also been essentially flat for decades, just at a level well below spending. Funnily, the people most concerned about debts and deficits—rich people and those who shill for them—are the ones most opposed to paying taxes.
Spending % has been flat for 50 years, but Republicans keep worsening the deficit with unfunded tax cuts.
Maybe stop giving control of our purse strings to the people digging us into this situation.
And multimillionaires,
and somewhat the millionaires.
See also, this post which is one of the most succinct statements on the state of taxes, spending, and the deficit that I have seen:
I’m very intrigued by what homeopathy can do here. It can replace fertizlers and pesticides, cleaning up the environment and our fresh water supply. We have to do this to get everyone healthy. It can replace widespread antibiotic use on livestock. We got to do these things or we’re all just going to be big pharma zombies.
Expanding the same tax cuts Trump passed last time that added trillions to the debt
The GOP concern about the debt is feigned because they are the ones who ran it up.
Add 1M btc at $2M per piece, and he cut 20% of the national debt :)
It seems unlikely raising the price 5x will increase demand 100x.
But just to drop the mic for anyone scrolling past your comment and thinking it has merit, let me make it clear why your taste in boot leather is disgustingly banal.
1) There’s an estimated 65 million millionaires on Earth. Let’s be super generous and say that 60 million of those have a net worth of at least $10mil USD, which would make the $5mil “golden visa” a viable investment without bankrupting them.
2) Now we deduct around 25 million people from that number, because that’s how many millionaires America is estimated to have. Now your audience is down to just 35 million people
3) Of those numbers, they’ve likely had multiple years to consider investing into the prior “golden visa”, which would’ve been achievable with about $100k. They did not apply, so it stands to reason they were not interested. So now our theoretical customer base is 0 people.
4) Now let’s consider newly-minted millionaires, say the AI and Quantum griftos. Being incredibly generous, let’s keep the same ratio as above, of 2/3rds being outside the USA. We’re now figuring, what, a million people? Tops?
5) Except, just like the crypto griftos, these people are likely to have a distrust of democratic institutions and regulations. So they’re unlikely to have begun the visa process beforehand at the lower rates, and now have to gauge the value of a US visa at $5m instead of $100k.
6) Factoring the increased costs of housing, healthcare, staples, and essentials, it’s highly unlikely they’d consider America as a viable destination over other, cheaper, more stable countries - like Switzerland. But being generous again, let’s say 250k people think yeah, America is where I want to be.
7) Except they can just buy property and visit on a tourist visa for less, keeping their main base elsewhere. They don’t have to migrate. So let’s cut that down to 50k who see the value in migrating, and can afford it, and can eat the higher costs of living in the USA, and can stomach the increased polarization and instability.
50k * 5mil = $250bn, or about a third of the defense budget. For one fiscal year.
They're lying to your face, and you need to accept that.
What's happening is the Republicans keep promising that their tax cuts will be self-funding, they never are. Spending is stable, they keep cutting revenue. It's their intention to cause the system to fail!