U.S. hit the Debt Ceiling THIS MORNING, Geithner takes extraordinary measures

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14 years ago 05/17/2011 12:15pm EDT

re: TheDonger

How much time did it take you to figure out the income tax rates we have total? 5 secs or 10secs? The tax code is about 70k pages long. It takes about 10 for the tax tables. The only reason to support a flat tax is that you want the rich to pay less and the middle class to pay more. Nothing wrong with that.

TheDonger wrote:
You are stuck in 2-sided thinking.. Raise or lower.
The whole personal and corp tax code needs to be simplified with flat rates. We dont need an entire service industry to explain and/or make a parasitic living off a cumbersome and complicated tax code.
Goose-Step on AE!

14 years ago 05/17/2011 7:56pm EDT

re: OldXCguy

Government spending should have outpace inflation in the 2000s. First off our population is growing. Having ~10% more people is going to require more workers. Second it is aging so instead of paying into SS and medicare and SS, they are taking money out. I have no clue if you should have expect Our debt crisis right now is mainly about lack of income. We are missing ~600 billion in tax revenue due to the recession/tax cuts. Throw in a 100 billion of spending for additional unemployment costs and whatever medicaid costs and you get over half of our current deficits.As far as growth of government spending in the 2000s is all about defense, medicare, and medicaid. The rest is pretty much all noise. Other than DHS (60 billion) and medicare part D (55 Billion) it isn't like we added a ton of new programs during the period. People got older and we invaded 2 countries. The defense problem will hopefully wrap itself up in a couple of years. The aging problem probably will take a lot longer.

OldXCguy wrote:
Ten years ago in 2001 our total U.S. Budget was about 1.9 trillion dollars.http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/budget.php
By 2011 that had about doubled to 3.7 trillion, while revenues have increased by just a few hundred billion. IMO, taxes will need to be raised, but clearly the increase in our government spending has far outpaced inflation . The ideology that government needs to get bigger and bigger to solve our problems has brought about our debt crisis.
It should be noted that when we had small budget surpluses in the late 1990's, the extra money was used to create more projects, rather than to reduce our already hefty debt. I, for one, would be more than willing to pay higher taxes, if I had some assurance that the money would go to reduce our deficit, and ultimately pay down our debt. I fear our debt has already gone beyond the point of no return, and that we will eventually either have to default, or inflate our way out of it, either of which will be disastrous.

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U.S. hit the Debt Ceiling THIS MORNING, Geithner takes extraordinary measures

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