Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.
The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.
Laying off the bottom 5% presumes that you’re measuring that accurately and that individual workers have control over their productivity, both of which are unlikely to be true - and if you get either wrong, you just incentivized playing political games and shying away from work which is hard, uncertain, or under-weighted by your metrics. Stack ranking almost destroyed the ability of Microsoft and Google to make anything people love, and you can see its cost in the unperformed maintenance work people know won’t juice their metrics.
Similarly, if people are leaving because you have too much work, poor working conditions, don't pay well enough, etc. capping rehiring is just going to make the situation worse.
If you’re not a PE guy looking to juice a company before dumping it, cost cutting has to be a process of understanding and identifying your true goals first. If you’ve truly over-hired, the first lesson to draw is that you have a management problem which you need to deal with first since it will make everything else likely to fail as well.
If your entire org is filled with lazy low performers, then it doesn't matter if productivity and morale is destroyed, because they don't have high productivity or morale in the first place.
* Social Security
* Medicare
* National Defense
* Interest payments
* Health
* Income Security
* VA Benefits
Which of those categories are we overspending on? Which specific cuts do you want to make? It's impossible for one to claim they're serious about saving money without talking about slashing Social Security, Medicare, and the military, which together make 40% of the budgets, so... which are you in favor of reducing?
When you've cut your budget as far as you can and you're still losing money, the only solution is to make more money. Here, that means taxes, and specifically that we must start taxing the rich. I'm not saying that as some far-left "eat the rich" kind of thing, but as basic arithmetic and economics. We need more revenue, and it has to come from somewhere.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The American middle and lower class are the least taxed individuals in the developed world. The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
I'm certainly open to changing how things like dividend income are treated, but the rich don't have enough money to solve our budget problems.
I think your question about what spending to reduce was intended to be rhetorical, but the answer is: everything.
Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...
> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket.
> Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-ta...
The average statutory top personal income tax rate in the EU is 42.8%.
"For comparison, the average combined state and federal top income tax rate for the 50 US states and the District of Columbia lies at 42.14 percent as of January 2025, with rates ranging from 37 percent in states without a state income tax to 50.3 percent in California."
Feel free to call the Tax Foundation an "anti-tax extremist organization" if you'd like, but I wouldn't agree and they are just reporting facts here.
Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In total, you are paying 39.22% of your income in taxes (including federal and payroll). As a baseline, if you are in Texas which doesn't have state income tax, you are paying around 31% for the same income.
Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.
That's why poor wind up paying more in flat tax states, it is simply WAI.
Marginal rates don't matter as much as how much you actually pay. On paper, CA has a top rate of 12.3%...on income over 720k dollars. It exists, but it doesn't seem like a thing we should ponder too much.
States only have so much power in setting tax rates, given that people are somewhat mobile. California being overpopulated for so long gave them some latitude here, but honestly income inequality isn't going to be handled at any level below federal.
But the point about Europe is right, but only in the sense that Europeans don't pay nearly as much in income taxes as most Americans think they do.
Why do you say this? Middle class Europeans pay significantly higher taxes than middle class Americans.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-co...
Denmark is the highest at 45%, compared to America's 27%. Switzerland, the only European country I've lived in, is just a hair above the USA at 28/29%. UK is only a few points above that, while France is just below Denmark. So I guess it really depends?
Also, the US has a more progressive federal income tax code than Europe (or every other developed country), so the tax burden in the US is carried more by the upper class than it is in those other countries, resulting in the average middle class American paying significantly lower taxes than a peer in Europe.
You keep comparing the US to Switzerland, which is a giant outlier in Europe and probably the most like the US in many ways (as you pointed out), when you should be comparing it to France, Germany, and all the other larger EU states with a stagnant economy and populations that have gotten substantially poorer relative to the US over the last 20+ years.
Also, because healthcare in the US is such a disaster, we do pay about what many other countries pay for socialized medicine via taxes, and then basically everyone under 65 (aka the people who cost way less to insure) have to pay for it again in the private sector.
If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
> If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I don't think America would be the same if it did, and I don't think Europeans are pining for "American success" even if you discount our broken healthcare system.
And?
They can afford more, and taxation is a way to reintroduce actual risk of financial ruin for the wealthy. If financial ruin is a good motivator for the rest of us, it should be for them, too.
It's not about percentage, it's about the reality that taxation brings about for you. When you have a net worth that's equal to the entire economic output of a major American city, you can endure massive tax bills because you make enough off of your holdings to equal the average lifetime earnings of dozens of Americans.
There's a reason nearly every developed nation has a VAT.
Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization. And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.
> And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
> I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
Really? You think I don't pay for services I don't use?
> Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
Do they? What do they know of the company? If I asked the beneficiary of a pension fund what the company does and where it was headquartered, would they know?
> Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
It's not far left to want general stability in your society. People with too much money and a government with too much debt are destabilizing forces.
The world is literally filled with examples of how this works, if you'd stop pretending that the current system in the US is working.
The top tax rate perhaps:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IITTRHB
Maybe just a coïncidence that inequality started going up around 1980, when it was cut the most.
The US has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and the average American has more disposable income than their peers anywhere else on Earth. Why is it that the upper class is the only one that needs to kick in more?
This is why we end up with indiscriminate and thoughtless cuts, because the alternative is people who seem to believe that every penny of government spending is absolutely essential the second after the line item is conceived, and the only way to fix any issues that exist is with more spending.
If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.
Absolutely. I in no way support what DOGE is doing.
But when people think cuts are needed (and the majority of Americans seem to think that's the case), and the options are your position that the country would seemingly collapse if a single job was cut and someone who is going to take a figurative chainsaw to the federal budget, don't be surprised when the chainsaw wins due to your refusal to compromise on your unreasonable and largely unpopular position.
If you want to cancel it out, there are many easier ways to do it, including things like more IRS auditing for tax evasion. There’s roughly a 10:1 return rate for enforcement, with an estimated gap of over half a trillion dollars.