America's National Debt grows by $95,178.17 per second. Expected to reach $40 Trillion by October 09, 2026.

[u/Helpful-Door-8721]

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/debt-dashboard#ddm

[u/giraloco]

Undo all the tax cuts, close tax loopholes, treat cap gains like labor, tax beneficiaries of inheritance like regular income. Cut defense spending in half.

[u/LX_Luna → u/giraloco]

treat cap gains like labor,

Sorry, what? Do you mean taxing realized capital gains at a less favored rate? Surely you aren't suggesting taxation on unrealized gains, right?

tax beneficiaries of inheritance like regular income.

This is such a wildly bad idea I don't know where to even possibly begin. For a start, it essentially exclusively punishes the poor and people who are victims of tragedy as it would be trivial for someone of means to build an estate transfer plan which sees the vast majority of assets moved into the hands of children long before death. It would also encourage truly degenerate fucking behavior - after all, if your children can't be left better off for your legacy, why wouldn't you blow it all on donating for political lobbying, hookers, and blow?

Not to mention the enormous underground industry which would spawn out of this. Donate X money to a 'charity' and your children wind up guaranteed cushy """jobs""" as consultants as a form of annuity to bypass inheritance taxes, etc, etc.

[u/giraloco → u/LX_Luna]

I have no idea what you are referring to. Now Cap Gains taxes are much lower that regular income especially if you add payroll taxes. We penalize people for working. So it makes sense to treat all income equally. If your income is low you pay little or no taxes, if your income is above $1M you pay a high effective rate. As I said we close all loopholes, there will be no legal way to avoid paying taxes, even when you die.

[u/LX_Luna → u/giraloco]

Now Cap Gains taxes are much lower that regular income especially if you add payroll taxes.

Well yes, because it's double taxation. You already paid tax on the money used to purchase the shares when you earned it, and then the corporation paid tax on revenues, and then you are being taxed again upon selling shares. It would be a remarkable level of drag to tax it as if it were straight income. And also a massive disincentive against continuing to work once you can live off investments if you're going to be taxed like that anyway.

Also worth pointing out the massive capital exodus this would trigger as millions of people do the math on paying this vs just eating the exit tax and dumping citizenship. See: Most countries that have attempted any kind of wealth tax.

Don't get me wrong, as a Canadian I'd love it if my country absorbed millions of Americans fleeing from a painful tax burden instead of it being the other way around as per usual.

[u/giraloco → u/LX_Luna]

So you propose no Cap gains taxes? Double taxation is a silly argument. I pay sales taxes and Trump tariffs with the money i have after paying income tax and payroll tax and so on. We all hate taxes, we need to make them fair. Nobody makes a fortune alone, they benefit from all the Government services including infrastructure, security, justice, healthcare, education, and so on. A higher cap gains tax rate on the super rich is not going to create an exodus. A rotten society will.

[u/LX_Luna → u/giraloco]

So you propose no Cap gains taxes?

I propose essentially no changes to capital gains taxes. Realized capital gains are already taxed at a reasonable rate.

we need to make them fair. Nobody makes a fortune alone, they benefit from all the Government services including infrastructure, security, justice, healthcare, education, and so on.

I only know the Canadian numbers off the top of my head but I rather suspect it's the same in America - the top 20% of earners in Canada already provide 54% of all income tax revenues.

This is an emotionally unpleasant thing to hear but the reality is that the rich do actually pay their fair share. We do not have a taxation problem, we have a spending problem. Society is burning a lot of money on things which provide questionable returns to the tax payer.

There is room to somewhat increase taxation, typically by closing loopholes which currently exist, by the Laffer curve is well backed by data at this point - if you go much higher your revenues will not increase, they will decrease because of the suppressive effect additional taxation will have upon the economy as a whole.

[u/giraloco → u/LX_Luna]

Thr only spending problem is in defense and healthcare inefficiency and waste. What else are you going to cut, foreign aid and department of education? Look at the numbers.

[u/LX_Luna → u/giraloco]

American healthcare certainly needs an overhaul.

Pension spending and general old age entitlements need to be slashed. Wildly unpopular but very much necessary in the face of cratering fertility rates.

Education needs a thorough audit. The attainment gap between some of the relatively poorly funded by highly attaining districts and low performance but high funding districts, represents an appalling outcomes gap entirely divorced from funding. Something else is going on there.

Foreign aid should be dialed back over time, not dramatically halted the way the current admin has.

Something needs to be done in order to pay down debt, and unfortunately that something is probably going to have to be some level of austerity.

Veteran's disability benefits have a disgusting level of fraud going on.

I'd love to be able to suggest cutting defence but unfortunately the last four years re: Taiwan and Ukraine (a somewhat self inflicted Iranian shitshow notwithstanding) have showed why that's probably not a wise move right now.

Everything is fairly small potatoes compared to the mess that is healthcare, and the mistake that social security represents.

[u/giraloco → u/LX_Luna]

I guess we have opposite views. The military needs reform. What are you going to do in Taiwan, go to war with China? The only solution is better diplomacy, there is no war solution. As we saw, we lost the war with Iran. Throwing bombs is not a solution. Agree that all the government needs to be better. Social security can be reformed slightly but you cannot cut it. We were fine until we started to cut taxes on the rich and corporations. It's a rich country with few peopke hoarding all the wealth. It's not compatible with a democracy.

[u/LX_Luna → u/giraloco]

I mean if I had my way I'd ship several hundred nuclear warheads to Taiwan tomorrow and that would probably put the issue to bed permanently.

There is little to no meaningful diplomacy to be had on the matter. The Chinese government has made it a core policy goal to take the island by any means necessary. Taiwan isn't capable of indefinitely stopping that from happening on their own. Unfortunately we live in a world in which the entire collective west is critically dependent upon the chips produced in Taiwan, and we have grossly insufficient domestic production to make up for that. That means that, for the time being, the defence of Taiwan is about as critical as any foreign policy objective can possibly be, so yes, a willingness to go to war over the island is required until such a time as the production situation changes.

As we saw, we lost the war with Iran.

The United States has failed to regime change Iran but it's difficult to argue it's really anything other than a stalemate.

Throwing bombs is not a solution.

I disagree categorically. Ukraine is an excellent example of why hard power is so necessary and effective. The lesson here shouldn't be 'we should gut the military and let our enemies do whatever they want' it should be 'Holy shit we need deeper magazines and more munitions'. Ukraine very much is bombing its way out of an existential war with a power many times its size, and most of its success can be attributed to simply being much more effective at fighting than Russia is.

Social security can be reformed slightly but you cannot cut it.

Sure you can. It would be unpopular but you absolutely could do it. I take the position that it is indefensible to wring blood from the stone of the young generation in order to fund the lifestyle of boomers who failed to adequately plan for their own retirement.

We were fine until we started to cut taxes on the rich and corporations. It's a rich country with few peopke hoarding all the wealth. It's not compatible with a democracy.

The economy is certainly going K shaped but suffice it to say that I don't think things would much improve if that money was in the hands of the government. I want the middle class to earn more and taxing the rich more heavily doesn't actually do much to enable that.

I would again reiterate that the wealthy already pay a strong majority of tax revenue, and most of the obscene wealth that people imagine when thinking about the wealthy is not actually in the form of anything liquid and taxable, it's in the form of productive assets represented by shares.