The Federal government spends $12,000 per person. If you are married and have 2 kids and 2 retired parents, you will need to generate $72,000 a year in taxes. Half of the country doesn't pay any income taxes, so you will need to pay theirs, too. That makes the gross bill $144,000. The government gets about 42% of its revenue from income taxes, so you will be liable for $60,480 in income taxes. To get to that level, you will need to declare $270,000 a year in income.
If you earn anything less than that, you're not paying your fair share.
If I were you, I'd get to work.
True.
ReplyDeleteAnd 80% of that is four items:
Pensions (social security)
Medical care (medicare/medicaid)
Defense
Welfare
Anybody who thinks we are going to take care of our budget problems without dealing with *all four* of those items is deluding themselves. And people claiming that some part of the other 20% of federal spending is the key problem, are either not paying attention or lying. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of deluded and/or dishonest people running for office.
Tim, are you suggesting we can't get by just cutting the budget - at the very real risk of nominal chaos, mind you - of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names? ;-)
ReplyDeleteTim, no one wants to be the one to tell us to eat our vegetables and floss.
ReplyDeleteI was noodling about this question while driving the other day and came home and found the research easy to do. It blows me away to see that the budget is premised on us averaging a family income of $260,000. That's insane.
Additionally, this understates the problem by quite a bit as I claimed 0 deductions when I breezed through the tax calculator. Add in mortgage, 401k and childcare deductions and you'll need a gross family income in excess of $300K.
The U. S. Board of Geographic Names is untouchable, SA. You should know that. Big Bird and Cookie Monster told me so.
ReplyDeleteSure, we could go ahead and cut the budget of the Board on Geographic Names; according to this document, they don't *have* a budget. Everybody on the Board is doing it as an uncompensated sideline to their actual primary jobs.
ReplyDeleteSo cutting their budget would net us a big fat zero in savings. And give about a dozen government employees a bit more free time.
You are adding money that is printed and borrowed to you figure. Those amounts are to be paid by the next generation, so subtract 40%.
ReplyDeleteFurther, Cap and. Trade is implemented in CA in August. California will get 1 or 2 billion a year and bankers will get several times that amount as pollution becomes a commodity that can be speculated. If implemented nationally the tax would represent tens or hundreds of billions more to balance our budget. So take off another 10% or so.
Finally a tax on air, implemented by CARB... thanks for all the fish!