It's you're, not your.
And I am to take your response as serious? Plucking a couple words out of context and using them as ad hominem attacks on me?
And even though your second statement is an associative ad hominem, I will say that my views align more or less with Ron Paul, although I never watch Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC. I look at figures on how much the US GDP is and how much the Obama budget calls for, and know there is no way to sustain that level of spending.
I do enjoy reading a certain libertarian economist's articles such as the excerpt found below, that demonstrates the utter folly of going after the "rich" as a source of governmental "revenue" to fix Congress's spending problem.
In 2011, Congress will spend $3.7 trillion dollars. That turns out to be about $10 billion per day. Can we prey upon the rich to cough up the money? According to IRS statistics, roughly 2 percent of U.S. households have an income of $250,000 and above. By the way, $250,000 per year hardly qualifies one as being rich. It's not even yacht and Learjet money. All told, households earning $250,000 and above account for 25 percent, or $1.97 trillion, of the nearly $8 trillion of total household income. If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would yield the princely sum of $1.4 trillion. That would keep the government running for 141 days, but there's a problem because there are 224 more days left in the year.
How about corporate profits to fill the gap? Fortune 500 companies earn nearly $400 billion in profits. Since leftists think profits are little less than theft and greed, Congress might confiscate these ill-gotten gains so that they can be returned to their rightful owners. Taking corporate profits would keep the government running for another 40 days, but that along with confiscating all income above $250,000 would only get us to the end of June. Congress must search elsewhere.
According to Forbes 400, America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August. The fact of the matter is there are not enough rich people to come anywhere close to satisfying Congress' voracious spending appetite. They're going to have to go after the non-rich.
What he does not go into is that over 46 percent of US households pay NO net federal income tax payment after all the filings are done; most of those households' non-payments are due to their low income (<$30,000/year)
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publicat ... ID=1001547
Which leaves only 42% of US households to shoulder the burden of the rest of the federal spending from August to December 2011.
The US cannot afford this level of spending. It must cut spending, not merely cut the INCREASE in spending over the next decade, which is what the recent "debt deal" was. It must cut spending. Buffet's suggestion of raising tax rates will not come close to fixing the US debt. In the extreme scenario listed above, tax rates can be raised to 100% on
everything higher than $250K and even that extreme measure
still does not solve the US debt problem, so I am at a loss as to where you think the 2012 US Government Budget of 3.7 trillion dollars is coming from, especially with all the wealth in the country being gutted in one year in the example above.
However, I feel that all this is wasted effort; since it doesn't agree with your preconceived ideas, you will simply dismiss the above as more "nonsense".
Tudamorf wrote:Exactly, and since the Bush tax cuts it has dropped off quite a bit from that magic number, which is why taxes need to be raised back to where they were pre-Bush, closer to the 20% figure. Like during the Clinton era, when our finances were, for a brief period, in a relative state of order.
And as I have stated before, Federal Income Tax rates can be 100%, 50%, 25%, it does not matter. Over the past 50 years, from 1960-2011, the total federal revenue received from all sources has been on average, ~15%-20% of the total US GDP. The tax rates from 1960-2011 varied widely from 90% to 33%, but the taxes received stayed at 15-20%, regardless of what the stated income tax rate. You can change the income tax rates all you want, but history over the last 50 years suggests it does not matter what the rates are, the federal government will get what it has always historically gotten.
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history