(08-01-2018 09:03 AM)WKUYG Wrote: (08-01-2018 08:52 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (08-01-2018 08:45 AM)WKUYG Wrote: I'm going to be honest with you...I flew right past your X amount and O amount and every other X or O or A or Z because in America we have a higher standard of living for most people to ever go to the UK model
You're missing the whole point. Nobody is saying go to the UK model. At least I'm not. All I'm saying is that we are shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of competitiveness because of the way we tax. We are going to have to balance the budget and start paying down the debt at some point. How would you propose to do it?
Reduced spending and cut out waste would be a very good start
If you think that 15% is going to balance the budget again you are fooling yourself. Hell you seem to think the US is a 3rd would country in terms of competitiveness. That's not the case at all.....
LOWER INCOME/standard of life or basically slave labor is why we import so much.
Most (probably all) of the EU needs that higher income to pay for the high price items they buy. One area that the US could never compete in compared to the EU....
Mass Transportation.... the USA is spread out a lot more than the EU so we depend on our cars. Triple the cost of gas in the US and see how that works.
Again most Americans are not paying as much in income (federal) as a 20% tax
A 15% consumption tax on a $20 trillion economy would produce roughly $2.5 billion (15% x 83% [average historical experience] of $20 trillion). The budget deficit is roughly $1 trillion. Sounds balanced, or better, to me. You could give up the $1.5 trillion that comes from personal income taxes and still be balanced. I don't understand why that math is so hard.
As for cutting expenditures, where would you go? Non-discretionary spending (entitlements, debt service) is about 2/3 of the budget. Of the discretionary items, defense is the largest at about 40%. Even if we spent zero on defense, that wouldn't balance the budget. So WTF do you cut to reduce spending by $1 trillion?
We're going to balance the budget by cutting spending is a pipe dream. There's to much baked into the cake already.
OK, I get that you want to restrain spending. So do I. But get real. As long as we are willing to run deficits, nothing is going to get cut. It's like my friend Rand Paul said in an interview the other day, "compromise" means that republicans get the increased defense spending they want, in exchange for letting democrats get the increased social spending they want. The only way to constrain spending is to balance the budget first, and then retire each spending increase to include spending cuts elsewhere or new taxes to pay for it.
And no, I don't think the US is a third world country in terms of competitiveness. Where did I say anything even remotely approaching that? Don't go pouting words into my mouth. I'm not interested in defending your straw men. We have so many geographic and demographic advantages that we should never be the world's biggest importer or biggest debtor. But we are, and have been for some time.