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> The government needs to shrink dramatically

Most (but not all) other developed countries have both a larger government and a smaller deficit per capita. A smaller government is not the only solution.

They are almost all also going bankrupt. Also, those governments may be efficient but the US is not. You do not get a more efficient government by making it larger.

They are almost all more solvent than the US.

I would need more data here. The US is highly solvent because of the global dollar as well as being a hegemonic military superpower.

The US is in the process of throwing away both advantages, so you have to judge simply by debt/deficit levels.

Debt-to-GDP of Germany is around 63%, that is notably less bankrupt than the US at 120% which is approaching Italy (that went from 154% in 2020 to around 135% now).

> The top 1% of earners already pay roughly half of all tax revenue, top 10% is roughly 75%.

Do you have sources for this? I was looking for reliable sources on this.

Yes, IRS SOI tables. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...

You can find high-level summaries from various websites, but they might have a bias eg: taxfoundation

According to the tables in that source, the top 0.001% pay about 25% income tax, which of course is income after they've had their accountants smooth over everything. The highest income tax percentage seems to be at the top 1% level. I assume this is due to higher income earners having better/more aggressive tax accountants.

If the people with 90% of the income pay less than 90% of the total income taxes, something is wrong. Every lower income should be paying less, as a percentage of their income.

I think we can debate on how progressive (in terms of as you earn more you pay more) the US tax brackets should be. They are already fairly progressive relative to peer nations.

However, I am skeptical that higher taxes or just taxing the rich or high earners more will solve the deficit or government efficiency issues.

Also I disagree with 90% of income should pay 90% of taxes. People who are better capital allocators than the government should be incentivized to allocate over paying taxes.

> Also I disagree with 90% of income should pay 90% of taxes. People who are better capital allocators than the government should be incentivized to allocate over paying taxes.

We've spent the past 50 years lowering the taxes on those who have the most income/wealth with only negative outcomes to show for it.

I think the mistake you're making is assuming that those best at accumulating capital are also the best at allocating it. If they were, I expect we'd see a lot more investment into new technologies and markets rather than the large increase in rent-seeking we have seen instead.

Put another way if your tax rate is 33% and you had to pay the government first.

Then every dollar you earn goes to the government until May 1.

In this scenario if you have to pay govt interest expense first then almost every dollar earned in January would go to paying the debt.

We are spending almost an entire month of everyone’s salary, not on providing anything of value but merely on paying for previous overspending.

This is such a Boomer way of looking at this. First of all, hardly anyone pays that much. Secondly, the more correct way of viewing such a situation is that you make a shitload of money.

1. I am not a boomer.

2. Do you think an ageist ad hominem improves your argument?

3. What even is your argument? That in this contrived hypothetical the person in question is making a “shitload” and that somehow invalidates that 20% of EVERY tax dollar collected is used to just pay interest on debt (not even principal, just interest)

In order to pay an effective federal tax rate of 33% you'd need to be making like seven figures and do nothing to reduce your taxable income.

That’s not the point the point is to illustrate that right now for every tax payer 20% of every dollar collected is spent on interest. Not even on the principal just on the interest expense.

Just stumbled across this: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-04-16/debunking-a...

> Myth No. 1: The rich don’t pay their fair share

> The top 1% of earners take in 22% of total income and pay 40% of all federal income taxes.

How misleading. Income here means AGI, i.e. taxable income as defined by the IRS. That excludes unrealized capital gains, loans against said unrealized capital gains, etc. For example, Elon Musk’s AGI was $0 in 2018 despite a massive increase in net worth. Wouldn’t call that his fair share.

> Myth No. 2: We’ll fix the budget deficit by taxing the rich

> We simply cannot. The collective net worth of every American billionaire is estimated at somewhere around $8 trillion. The projected federal deficit over the next decade alone approaches $25 trillion. Even a one-time total confiscation of every billionaire’s wealth wouldn’t come close, and you only get to do it once.

Hilarious argument. Suddenly it’s billionaires instead of the previously mentioned top 1%. Their estimated net worth is more like 40 to 50 trillion. Not to mention how much that wealth is expected grow in the next 10 years.

The entire article is similarly underhanded and clearly meant to mislead. Or perhaps to reinforce the views of readers who already agreed and weren’t going to think critically anyways. Doesn’t take a genius to guess who paid for it.

unrealized capital gains ≠ income.

Excellent observation, and this is the entire problem.

They pledge their unrealized capital gains as collateral for billions in loans, spend the cash, and pay single-digit interest instead of income tax.

Repeat until they die, then their heirs inherit the shares at a stepped-up cost basis, so the gains are in fact never taxed.

Again, I’d ask you to engage with this:

> I wouldn’t call that their fair share.

But they are part of your net worth. If somebody who becomes richer every year, passively, has "no income", then the definition of income does not match people's intuition about what constitutes fair targets for taxation.

There is a good case to be made to tax wealth rather than income, which comes closer to people's intuition about what's fair.

>Only 60% of US households earn enough to pay federal income tax.

That's the problem. It's not a spending problem per se, but the market's misallocation of resources. Too many resources are concentrated in too few hands.

That's not to say we should abandon capitalism, but rather we should change the incentives to support higher incomes more broadly, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not a coincidence that deficit spending/public debt skyrocketed when we cut the top tax brackets. That changed the incentives from encouraging paying good wages and investing in business growth to hoarding capital and the financialization of everything.

Feel free to disagree, but the historical numbers support that.

tl;dr: change the incentives to broaden the distribution of resources across the economy, strengthening the economy (70% of which is consumer spending) and increasing, in a broad-based way, tax revenues.

I am doubtful here (but eager to see data that says otherwise)

- The US median per capita income is quite high (top 2 or 3 globally IIRC). In light of that and the stat that the bottom 40% don’t pay federal income tax makes me think the tax brackets are already fairly progressive vs thinking the lower 40% is especially low earning.

- Additionally income inequality has been decreasing in recent years with lower percentile income earners increases outpacing even the relatively high inflation.

- I agree we should revert back to some policies.

- I don’t think there is much hoarding of capital, most high earners invest heavily.

>We developed chronic overspending habits when interest rates were historically low

Weird, they were historically low because the money printers went brr. So the "We" you're talking about is both Republicans and Democrats, and not much else.

So basically, the interest rate is meaningless, so everything that follows is probably just as meanginless.

>The government needs to shrink

Just because the government makes bad choices doesnt mean whatever fills the vacuum with make good choices.

Yes, both parties have objectively failed their mandate to look after the long-term interest of the American people and instead focused on short-term wasteful policies focused on their own party goals.

Governments that consistently make bad choices eventually die one way or the other.