It takes taxes to build a great country.
How do we have a great infrastructure without taxes to pay for it? Corporations and businesses are not going to pay for better roads or better storm sewage drains or better bridges or better airport runways. All these things will continue to deteriorate as the desire to pay less and less in taxes continues to be the dominant political philosophy.
It's a sad reality. If you want a great country, you have to pay to build it. With almost all the wealth going to the super wealthy and being stashed in secret foreign accounts, our country is on a downward spiral. And it is much quicker than we may think.
We must have a political Party that is not afraid to ask the wealthy to pay more in taxes. Simply calling for more "middle-class" taxcuts and continuing to offer more and more loopholes for the wealthy is not the way to fix the problem.
Although Reagan worshipers refuse to acknowledge the truth, that is the time when deficits began to get out of control. Our national debt, when Reagan took office, was less than $1 trillion dollars. It is now about $19 trillion. And this new debt did not go to help the poor or middle class. It went straight to the top and has gotten worse every year since the Reagan and George W Bush tax cuts went into effect.
Bill Clinton proved that with a minimal increase in taxes on the top and a good economy, the budget could be balanced. We did not have to go into all this debt. Reaganomics and the Republican philosophy of more and more taxcuts has torn down our country and put us on a path to Third World status. We must have the courage to speak up and to change these policies if we wish to have a great country once again.
Donald Trump wants to "Make America Great Again" but I doubt that he is willing to pay more in taxes. The Democratic Party has been on the wrong track for a long time with this issue.
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You'll have to click on the link. It shows federal receipts as a percentage of GDP. Actual receipts increase and decrease with recessions and growth, but the percentage GDP has remained relatively constant.
Note that we're just above the average for the last 70 years, and the period of infrastructure build-out in the '50s and '60s that we think of as "making America great" had a slightly lower federal receipts/GDP ratio.
Much of the increase in the later Clinton years resulted from increased wages without price-indexing the tax rates, plus a whole lot of bonuses and capital gains. (That last bit was unsustainable, by reasoning.) Clinton's peak receipt/GDP matched the peak during WWII.
It's not so much the amount collected as where it's spent.
As revenues/GDP stay relatively flat, more is collected as FICA/social security. Much of that is saved, but at this point we're not saving FICA. It's pretty close to being break-even.
(image from http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history)
While the receipt/GDP is holding steady, now 2/3 of the expenses are mandatory--some are VA benefits, some are for transportation and other things, but 7/8s are for entitlement programs. 1/3 of the overall budget is discretionary, with a bit more than 1/2 of the discretionary spending going to the military.
In 1962, a bit less than 25% of the federal budget was for mandatory programs. If that were the case today, we'd have over $1.5 trillion in additional discretionary spending available for "infrastructure." I don't think most would want to go back to that set of budget priorities.
Even with the higher marginal rates on high income households, it's not the total receipts or total outlays that matter, but how budget priorities shifted. Over time, the shifts pushed many trillions of dollars from discretionary to "mandatory", mostly social, programs.
I'd note one thing that's often overlooked but really important. We're no longer #1 in college graduation or college grads as a percent of population not because fewer kids go to college but because some countries have surpassed us. It's the same with "America great." We're not #1 in everything because much of the world has caught up, and it was far easier to be #1 in all kinds of things in 1960 than it is today. It's an embarrassment, some think, that China has a larger economy (if it does), but it has 3x the population. It's an embarrassment that India has more college kids than we have, but it's a fricking huge population and had better if it has any hope of succeeding. America was "great" largely because the rest of the world was a pit--after WWII, Europe and much of Asia were trashed, Africa still hasn't risen, and S. America was a backwater, while the US had built up a lot of primary industries for the war effect.
