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No, you can also raise taxes. The deficit is 4% of GDP. If we raised taxes by 4% of GDP, we'd still be less than the OECD average. We'd be the same as Australia, which is the second lowest-tax Anglosphere country.

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We are spending 3 trillion extra dollars than we take in taxes per year. That means taxes would go up by 75 percent. Even then it doesn’t matter because we will spend even more. Everyone agrees to spend, no one agrees to cut

I must have been looking at old data, but it looks like $1.9 trillion in FY2026. So that's 6.5% of GDP rather than 4% like I said above. Taxes as a percentage of GDP is currently about 25%, so going up to 31.5% would be a 26% jump. Not great, but not catastrophic.

But I agree that if we raised taxes we would just spend more. :(

If taxes are raised then the people have to pay for the services, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do. That is the whole appeal of having those services — that they are, for all intents and purposes, free.

I mean this is the problem with half a century of global-hegemony-fueled debt binging. We could balance the budget our taxes would still be $2.7 trillion lower than what they would be if we were at the EU average.

Hegemony is large irrelevant as much of Europe is facing the exact same issue, some of it much worse than the US

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