Cost of interest on federal debt in 2012 is a staggering

[mbperrin]

21. Please don't get hysterical. It serves you ill.

You seem unaware that the highest bracket was 50% as late as 1987, and that was after the tax cuts of JFK and Ronald Reagan. Quite normal for those who receive huge amounts of service from the government to pay huge amounts of tax as well. Otherwise, it's theft, which it has been for decades now.


Check your population figures again for the 1950s. I was alive then, but someone as young as you apparently doesn't realize that we were the wealthiest country on earth then as well as now, with quite a few wealthy individuals, as well as a growing and healthy middle class with real upward mobility, not like now.

This is not a theoretical discussion - I'm basing it on historical fact. When a country grows, as we are now and always have, you need more expense from the government, not less, unless you think less education, worse roads, bad air, and sick people are good things to be embraced.


Please show me in arithmetic that an economy of $16 trillion in size cannot raise $4 trillion in taxes with a rate of 100%. See how silly that claim is? Of COURSE there is a taxing level that will allow the federal government to spend 25% of the nation's economy, because 25% is less than 100%.

And somewhere in your argument is some sort of idea that the economy is static, with just the same actual money in it year after year and that somehow taxes reduce the size of an economy, both simply wrong by any economic analysis.

We DO tax everybody in some way now. For example, here in Texas, the poorest person still pays the 8-3/4% state sales tax. So do three year olds if they are buying something with grandpaw's gift money. Renters pay their landlord's property taxes, even if it's awful housing. And on and on.

Of course, the tax segment getting the best treatment is the artificial person catergory - corporations. They pay nearly nothing, about 1/10 of all federal taxes, even though their profits this year of about $6 trillion are nearly half of the total economy. In fact, by simply charging a net effective rate of 16% on corporate profits alone, without adding to any other tax group at all, would raise the $1.1 trillion deficit and close it. 35% would allow us to pay the debt off completely in 10 years and accumulate large surpluses in excess of $2 trillion per year after that.

That would be my personal preference, but hey, I'm not running things, obviously. And we didn't even discuss new tax possibilities, like a transaction tax on every stock trade. There's money everywhere in this richest of all countries that ever existed. There's just lots of people who don't want to pay the government some of it.