Quote:
Originally Posted by SentraSE-R
Lots of false "facts" in this discussion. Old Mech's 7/12 and Thymeclock's 100% tax burdens jump out as gross exaggerations when the real tax burden is 28% per the Wiki Tax Freedom Day link.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the elephants in the room. Something like 75% of our federal tax burden goes to pay for the past borrowing that past Presidents and Congresses have done - with the notable exceptions of Clinton, Carter, and Nixon in my lifetime, and to pay for the costs of the continual cost of the undeclared wars we foment and participate in.
|
Er, 75%?
We're making no effort to pay down our debt, just paying interest. For 2010 that was $164 billion, see graph of Obama's 2010 federal budget:
A whopping 4.63%...
However, our rates have been depressed for a while (ZIRP FTW!) and eventually the markets will force this upwards and that percentage is gonna skyrocket.
DoD is 18.74%
No, the elephant in the room is our mandatory social spending. If you cut EVERYTHING (totally eliminate DoD, close all the military bases, no wars, no dept. of Energy, no Dept. of Education, shut down the White House, no DoT, no HUD, etc.) and only funded Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Welfare/UE plus pay interest of our debt, we will STILL be running a deficit.
These four programs plus interest make up 61.4% of our budget ($2.18 Trillion) and there were only $2.16 Trillion in revenues for 2010. The rest is borrowed.
BTW, there was some trickery with Clinton's "surplus" too. It was only a surplus if you ignore that he (like the presidents before him and after) was pulling from the Social Security fund. Most people believe there is some pool of money that we're going to start dipping into now that Social Security is starting to spend more than it brings in. This isn't true, it was already spent and is just a pile of I.O.U.s.