To put our debt in real numbers....

AspenValley wrote:

The Viking wrote: So since AV isn't answering me. How much is raising taxes going to effect our economy and how much revenue will it raise? And if you don't know, then why are you for it?

I'll answer it for you, Viking. Raising taxes increases revenues to a point but it is not a simple dollar for dollar increase. At some point high taxes are a disincentive to business growth, although determing exactly where the point that a tax increase becomes counter-productive is not easily predicted. Carefully structured tax increases have less effect on business growth than many anti-tax proponenets will admit. Exactly how much revenue it would raise is also not a question anyone can answer because it depends on a lot of other factors. Like whether the economy is recovering or deflating, whether there is inflation in the picture, whether unemployment is rising or decreasing. No one can predict those factors in the future, so no one can tell you exactly how much revenue increase you would receive from a tax increase. If they say otherwise they are bald-faced liars.

Yep, the real problem with the Laffer curve is you don't know what effect increasing taxes will have on revenues and job losses unless you do it.
So even the "non-partisan" CBO is only guesstimating on how much new tax increases would yield or cut.

AspenValley wrote: Stopping spending would not pay off the debt, anymore than having your credit cards revoked while you are $327,000 in hock to them will pay it off.

We can either:

1. Raise taxes.
2. Inflate our currency to the point where the debt becomes small enough in real dollars to get a handle on.
3. Default.

That is the reality. All the wishing and hoping and Voodoo Economics that let people believe they could cut taxes at the same time they are increasing spending is what got us here, not what will get us out of it.

All three alternatives involve pain, which is why few people are willing to do what it takes to actually get rid of the debt. The debt is a symptom of the problem (believing you can have your cake and eat it too) not the cause as some would have you believe.

That presumes that we keep the cable TV subscription with every channel, the 5 cell phones complete with unlimited talk, text and data for all five lines, eating out 3 nights a week, going to the movies every weekend, purchasing a new car every couple of years regardless of the existing balance transferred to the new loan over and above the purchase price and taking our vacations in Europe every year that caused the accumulation of the $375K in credit card debt to begin with.

And you are right, continuing to increase spending by 7% a year when we have absolutely no hope of raising the revenue to pay for it is exactly how we got to where we are. The common sense solution is to cut spending. Not trim back the 7% increase to a 6.8% increase every year, actually reduce the physical amount that is spent from year to year from $3.7 Trillion this year to $3.663 Trillion next year, to $3.62 Trillion the following year and so on and so forth until the revenue that comes in is matched by the spending that goes out on a regular and consistent basis and then hold it there. We didn't get into this situation overnight and we aren't going to get out of it overnight. What makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is to plan on spending 107% of what we spent this year next year when we are forecasting the economy to grow at a 3% clip. Given that the GDP isn't even growing at that rate, it makes even less sense than it didn't make before.

You are not going to get a 50% increase in revenue to match spending AV, that simply isn't going to happen on this side of the rabbit hole. You can't raise the tax burden that much under these or any other economic conditions and expect the economy to grow rather than shrivel. Is there something about this that eludes your comprehension? We can't raise spending 7% a year each and every year regardless of what is happening around us. We can't plan on spending 107% more next year than we did this year into perpetuity.

The option you left out was to gradually reduce the amount we spend until it is smaller than the amount we take in and pay back what has been borrowed a little at a time until it is paid off. I'm not sure why that isn't an option in your world mind you, but it is an option nonetheless. We stop pretending that we can spend anywhere from 2% to 7% above the 18% of GDP that history tells us we can expect to receive in the DC coffers. DC is going to get 18% of GDP averaged over time regardless of where the tax rates are set and regardless of how high the privilege tax is set on an ever expanding amount of income. Tax rates affect behavior. That has been proven over and over again. It is why the percentage of GDP realized as revenue by DC hasn't changed even though both the tax rate and the amount of income subject to the privilege tax has been doubled in my lifetime. It is why the percentage of GDP realized as revenue by the DC government is the same as it was when the marginal tax rate was at 70% as it was when the top rate was 28%. The folks in DC are going to average 18% of GDP in revenue over the next 30 years just as they have for the previous 30 years and the 30 years before that. That's all there is, there ain't going to be no more. If you want to stop accumulating debt you can't spend 25% of GDP on 18% of GDP in revenue. You can only spend 18% of GDP when you are getting 18% of GDP in revenue.

Know what percentage Clinton collected during his 8 years with his tax rates? 18.39% of GDP.
Know what percentage Bush 43 collected during his 8 years in office? 17.78% Truman? 19% - during a period when no other nation had any manufacturing left because it had all been devastated by the war.
Reagan? 17.91% Carter? 17.33% Nixon/Ford? 17.37% Kennedy/LBJ? 17.42% Starting to get the picture yet? 25% of GDP has never once been collected in taxes, not a single time. 20% of GDP in revenue has been reached exactly twice since the end of WWII - 1952 and 2000. 18% of GDP is the tax capacity of this nation AV. We can either learn to live within it or bankrupt ourselves by ignoring it.