Subject: Re: Paying off National Debt
I'm just saying, $2k per year to be in America.....I'd take the deal.

Yeah, but it wouldn't be that, for sure.

The national debt is about $32.7 trillion. If we were to pay that off like a mortgage, over 30 years and assuming about an average 4% interest rate, we'd need to pay down about $1.87 trillion per year. The national deficit is currently about $1.6 trillion per year. So to keep the debt from rising, and pay it off over thirty years, we would need to raise federal taxes by about $3.47 trillion per year.

There are about 131 million households in the U.S. So to raise $3.47 trillion more dollars per year, you'd need to collect about $26,000 from each household in extra taxes. Which is obviously impossible - the limit for the lowest quintile of U.S. income by household is only about $28,000. You can't raise more in taxes than people actually earn, and if you take all their money in taxes they'll starve to death absent social services (which digs you deeper in the hole). It literally can't be done.

That doesn't mean that we couldn't pay off the national debt in 30 years. It just means that you can't possibly do it with a tax that is the same for every person or household, rich or poor. You can't pay off the debt if you only charge someone like Warren Buffett an extra $26K while charging his secretary that same $26K - there aren't enough people who make enough money to cover $26K to let Buffett bear so little tax burden.

Instead, you'd have to tax people more if they make more - someone who makes a million dollars per year will have to pay more in "debt tax" than someone who makes $10K per year. Federal tax receipts are roughly about $3.67 trillion, so basically you're talking about doubling everyone's taxes. Every year, for the next 30 years, you'll pay about double what you pay now. Even that's probably absurd, since there will be plenty of people who can't afford to pay double their FICA today - but still, that's kind of the order of magnitude level of taxes to pay down the national debt in 30 years.