U.S taxes are ~17% of GDP. That’s already significant.
Lets increase corporate taxes manyfold so its the primary source of revenue, and gut defense spending to 1/3 its size, without cutting personal income tax too much. Lets not touch medicare or anything at all. Let’s pretend that’s somehow politically viable and wouldn’t topple the US government from riots in the streets:
thefiscaltimes.com/…/20261016-US-Budget-Deficit-R…
chart showing expenses and revenue of us govt
…We would still barely break even.
And that’s before the AI bubble pops, and kills tax revenue.
There’s basically no way around this without touching something painful, like social security.
sportsjorts@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I appreciate the work that you have put into researching this.
I’m still not convinced that the process doesn’t start at the top and work its way down as opposed to the old tried and true American way of cutting “entitlements” (fucking hate that word) first. I think that it would make much more sense to start by making those who have used all kinds of tax loopholes and defied regulation to shift the burden onto the tax payers (coal plants, Walmart tesla etc.) and essentially have tax payers help prop up their businesses and the government be their piggy banks (defense contractors and Haliburton etc.) than to go back to what we have been doing for so long and cutting programs that actually help improve the way of life gdp and don’t look like real money on paper like snap Medicaid and Medicare.
That’s FDR kind of stuff. And it’s stuff that helps get us back into the black policy and happiness wise which is a metric that no one wants to be added to how to factor the gdp because it would send America to dead last in the world. This place is a prison.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
It’s a good idea. Kill the tax loopholes.
But, separately, I am asserting that the theoretical amount of money we gain is not the right order of magnitude. What you propose by itself would yield revenue, but barely enough to make a dent.
And if it’s somehow an extreme order of magnitude that’s gained, we run into a more fundamental issue: civilizations where an extremely large percentage of GDP is taxed (let’s say well over 33%) tend to get in serious trouble, historically.
The idea is good. But it’s just not enough by itself, even theoretically, once borrowing costs explode, which is all-but-certain to happen now.
sportsjorts@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Economics aside, the only thing I’ve learned about this country that is consistent, is it’s ability to sustain its fear and hatred in order to bamboozle the public. It’s been my entire life here since 9/11. And it’s been a huge hate grift ever since with disastrous side effects punctuated by democrats rebuilding the economy everytime a republican president slams it into the ground. It’s he idea that the market can sustain externalzing costs like happiness and satisfaction, health etc. is like trying to model climate change. We dont have all the information to really see the real time variables we need to account for.
I just had a conversation with a Finnish person and they were like, “wages have been stagnating here for forever and there isnt unrest like in America” (loose on the quotations on that,) and it’s like well you have so many guarantees that we don’t have.
I guess I just kind of see it as a returns problem that we keep trying to solve with the gdp . And I feel like Dem. Administrations have a tendency to approach my point with their marked investments in social safety nets and programs that benefit the public over the mega wealthy (while also benefiting the mega wealthy but to a lesser degree, because money and being monied is ab affiliation all of its own accord and separate from the common American language experience.)