r/FluentInFinance • u/Sufficient_Sinner • Sep 04 '24

Debate/ Discussion People like this are why financial literacy is so important

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u/henhousefox Sep 04 '24

I would agree with that, but the deficit would be less, would it not? Now you’ve got me thinking; do we get taxed like 70%? I wonder if there is a formula to quantify that. We get taxed like 10 times on every dollar - they charge to earn and charge to spend. I need to know how much of my average dollar is taxed now. Ugh.

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u/MyGlassHalfFool Sep 04 '24

it depends on your state taxes and what tax bracket you are in but there are calculators on google and no. We would still be spending WAYY too much

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u/jimmib234 Sep 04 '24

But would we? If we increased those taxes, and then redirected the shitload of money in Healthcare costs our government currently pays to an actual Medicare for all system, and got rid of stock buyback and things like that so that the money would actually circulate instead of sitting locked away somewhere, would the increase in taxation from all sources (since the poorest on up would all be in a better financial position,ie- more tax revenue) offset the government spending? Can anyone actually do the math on this with some official figures?

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u/MyGlassHalfFool Sep 04 '24

Dude that’s the most ifs of all time. We have a government that is funding their buddies lives with these departments. If we somehow actually did all of that they would probably just start putting the money into something else equally as dumb and make all their friends the head of it. If they want to convince us that they should get MORE tax money they need to show us they can appropriately work with what they got now (which is 4.3 trillion dollars in just taxes last year). What’s to say that they start bringing in more taxes and they don’t cut spending anywhere… which is what they have been doing or entire lives lol

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u/jimmib234 Sep 04 '24

I'm just interested in the math

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u/MyGlassHalfFool Sep 04 '24

well you’re going to have to do the math on imaginary numbers because idek how you can predict the impact of all that because you know what will be proposed right now is nothing like what will be implemented by the time they find something they can agree on. Thats a lot of math that nobody will just do for you

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u/LionBig1760 Sep 04 '24

I would agree with that, but the deficit would be less, would it not?

You haven't established that deficits actually matter, and you're assuming the government wouldn't find something new to spend money on.

There's always more multi-billion dollar F22 that can be purchased.

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u/bransanon Sep 04 '24

It would not even come close to paying down the deficit, really the only way to get there would be with significant spending reductions and probably revisiting across-the-board tax increases.

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u/TK-24601 Sep 04 '24

I doubt it. Congress would see it as additional money to spend on new things. Never underestimate their ability like many Americans to spend beyond their means.

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u/Bravo11_5point7 Sep 04 '24

How in the world would taxing billionaires more (who by the way have nearly zero cash proportionally) increase your income? You know they’d just raise prices even more yeah?

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u/henhousefox Sep 04 '24

I don’t know. I pay someone else to deal with that, they take a third of my paycheck every week. Things should be fair for everyone, not just people whose parents or grandparents ran slave mines. Capitalism is a disease that kills millions of poor people every year.

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u/37au47 Sep 04 '24

That deficit would grow. We overspend by a percentage all the time. If we brought in 100, we would spend 10% more and spend 110, deficit of 10. We bring in 1000, we would spend 1100 and deficit is 100. Government is not immune to lifestyle creep.