It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
Not to mention insurance companies and pension funds, plus local, state, and foreign governments
But yeah, having to pay your debts do suck
I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.
Debt payments and defense budget increases add up.
Why, in your view, doesn't the same thing happen to them?
They view themselves as stewards of these resources and genuinely want to spend them optimally to ensure the best return for everyone in society including future generations.
That isn't the case in America and will never be the case.
America is a failed state.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
The more money that's up for grabs, the higher the incentives for fraud and general abuse.
I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain. Instead it's always the promise that just [X] more billion from [billionaire] and we could solve homelessness
Are you simply calling the entire government a "welfare state" or do you believe that something like military spending is off the table for making more efficient? Because people very obviously would complain about shifting military spending to social programs and military spending is almost certainly the biggest differentiator in spending between us and those "'social democracies' such as Finland, France and Canada" that OP was talking about.
Which is why these calculators should tell people who pay less than $32K that they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes...
The same 5% who in many cases run massively profitable companies that pay their workers on the bottom so much less than a living wage that they are forced into tax-funded social safety net programs like SNAP to survive.
That 5% can cry me a river about their tax burden.
Agencies could recommend funding levels, Congress could recommend an allocation and if a taxpayer didn't change it, that default would take effect. But if a taxpayer preferred, they could say, "no, I won't be funding DOD this year". Or space nerds might say "I'm sending 100% of my tax dollars to NASA!"
Of course no one would likely choose to do boring stuff like paying interest on debt. So we'd probably end up with incredibly well-funded national parks and cool space missions, and also a crippling recession due to defaulting on the national debt.
For example, if you have a country on the older side, most people will vote to heavily fund social security at the expense of education. As the demographics change, would be no mechanism to correct the issue. Demographics become destiny.
Similarly, taxes allow rich areas to prop up poor areas of the country. California subsidizes the majority of states for example.
Part of the genius of taxes as a technology is that it allows (forces) a large group of people to coordinate to solve problems that they wouldn’t have otherwise. In the ideal case, it allows smart, forward thinking people to solve collective issues.
California doesn't pay taxes though, people in California do.
Not trying to be pedantic but this is a common framing that is, at its core, completely incorrect. States don't subsidize states because taxes aren't earmarked based on what state they came out of, it's all just government reallocation of wealth by one means or another.
Even if you were to accept this framing, California's net contribution does not cover the shortfall from 26 states, so the statement would be wrong even if it wasn't deceptive.
I am aware of the fact that states do not subsidize states, but actually drilling down to the taxpayer level makes the argument even stronger. As long as there are regional differences in benefits from federal funding, you get the same effect.
The farming states benefit disproportionately from farm subsidies. Oil producing states benefit disproportionately from oil subsidies. And states near DC benefit disproportionately from federal bureaucracies.
One could deduct taxes aren't solving collective issues, otherwise there wouldn't be any given The U.S is the biggest economy in the world yet millions can't even effort decent Healthcare.
You don't even need a country to be on the older side. Canada's age demographic distribution is normal compared to other countries but since the older population has greater political capital (they donate and vote more), they predominantly benefit from political action at the expense of the younger class. The Liberal party won the previous election in large part by stoking fear in boomers about Trump and the USA, while ignoring issues that the younger generation faces.
In 2015, Canada ranked well above the US and 5th on the World Happiness Report. We now rank 25th. If you break that down by demographics, Canadians over 60 still rank in the top 10, but Canadians under 25 rank 71st. It's the largest gap between the young and the old of all developed nations, and a key indicator of what the priorities of government have resulted in.
Another indicator: For the first time in recorded Canadian history, men over 65 now out-earn men aged 25 to 34. Youth unemployment is ~15%. More than one in five young Canadians is underemployed. Young Canadians under 45 have seen virtually no real income growth since 2000.
Still, I would welcome the opportunity to let Sacramento know that, in my opinion, they spend too much on education and welfare and not enough on infrastructure.
It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived.
I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.
The biggest financial culture shock between the UK and the US is the property tax situation. The UK has a "council tax" paid by the _occupier_ (i.e. the renter, if a house is rented) that pays for local services, and it's in the low thousands of pounds per year regardless of the value of a house.
Trying to think of a place where there is no chance of fire and all I’m coming up with is the moon
Obviously doesn’t scale to a city.
For example, if you ask your average normal person who's critical of foreign aid spending how much they think we should spend on it, if they don't answer "zero dollars" (and most don't!) they're very likely to name a percent of the budget that would represent a huge increase in our foreign aid spending. This is because they think it's a far larger part of the budget than it is (probably because it's received such a huge amount of attention that they assume it must be a lot, or else why would their trusted media figures complain about it so much?)
Misconceptions like that abound. Like, you wanna guess where most people are gonna shift some of that money if you remind them to make sure they allow enough funding for maintaining our nuclear weapon stockpile, but don't tell them exactly where to put that money? I bet it's not the Department of Energy.
Moreover, this would just incentivize politicians for both nefarious and benevolent reasons to bundle unrelated stuff into departments that people choose to fund better, laundering their popularity into necessary-but-obscure services or pet-project/corruption stuff.
Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.
Still, yeah, as an experiment it doesn't seem likely to work. There is probably something to putting people a little closer to the action though.
The idea breaks down for the rich who are being taxed the most, because nobody wants them to have any say.
You could maybe do it for some percentage of taxes. Perhaps only for things that are desirable but not necessities (maybe Symphonies, science, high arts funding, sports funding, humanities education, BBC, other things people think they shouldn't pay for).
Although that would make people ask for a slider to reduce their taxes (to zero, thank you).
As with voting, implementing your idea would be subject to exploitation. For it to work, you would need a way of ensuring that each taxpayer/voter was authorized to vote, and voted only once. You would need to somehow prevent "harvesting" too.
Those who have an interest in exploiting the system would lobby for built-in weaknesses that they could exploit.
Change that to "allocation where they personally would like the entire budget to go." Otherwise, this is a recipe for an even worse power imbalance than we have today. The rich (who pay more taxes, and therefore whose sliders are more powerful) would have a greater influence on the budget than the poor, in your system.
If taxpayers should have the freedom to decide how the money that is taken from them is spent, then why shouldn't they have the freedom to decide how much money they pay?
If taxes aren't collected because the ends justify the means, then the only other option is that they are collected to punish the taxpayers.
The former can be morally justifiable, but how do you justify the latter?
I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.
I'd say we spend a lot on things a few people who can maintain/expand power see ROI for power on. Sometimes that's things, sometimes that's just cash for voters and future voters.
The sliders world is more about consent via revenues of the governed, rather than the tax crop they really are.
people like paying for medical innovations. people are consenting to that. i mean, they certainly feel it is unfair when they have something they must pay for in order to survive, but in general, people have been choosing "expensive medical innovations" as an alternative to "dying" since the advent of the venture pharmaceutical system.
slider world CANNOT fix the problem that for some people, medical innovations are expensive. people will pay ANY price to cure a terminal illness suffered by their child, for example - there is no MARKET PRICE or AUCTION PRICE or VALID PRICE, i mean you can put a number into the slider, but you can see how "average of current + creditable worth" would be the answer to "what would you pay to cure your kid's terminal illness?"
and this is so, so much more interesting to talk about than taxes or vague nihilism about power. but no. it's too unorthodox. are you getting it? the website is stupid, why is it so hard to say that?
To some extent? But the sliders would probably be even more extreme. If you are 70 years old you’ll probably vote to put everything on Uncle Sam’s credit card and let younger generations deal with it after you’re dead.
If that were the case, I'd go all in on hookers and blow.
The alternative is Modern Monetary Theory, which states that the government and banking sector money creation fund spending, and governments cannot run out of currency.
Taxes control the money supply and mop up excess funds, which controls inflation.
Bonds set interest rates.
Spending is a strategic and political choice, not something limited by "the deficit" - which is literally just the difference between spending choices and taxation choices.
One very obvious tell is how Republicans make a lot of noise about the deficit and the debt, but always raise both when they're in office.
Always. Why? Because they spend government money lavishly on themselves and their patrons, and cut taxes for themselves and their patrons.
This doesn't "create jobs", it clogs up the system with sclerotic piles of cash that drive an extractive economy that sits on top of the productive economy most people live in.
This is very different economically to stability spending - welfare, healthcare, and such - and investment spending, such as direct funding of education and R&D.
In the MMT, the most significant drivers of inflation are corporate profiteering and supply shocks.
Like oil crises. For example.
I can only conclude that the reason it hasn't been done is because they don't actually want you to know.
Medicaid: 10%
"Safety Net": 7.1%
Social Security: 22.6%
Medicare: 14.2%
53.9% of the federal budget is spent on welfare. That seems roughly in line with most Western nations.
The benefits that are intended to go exclusively to the impoverished though, those are extremely means-tested and often have work requirements or other hoops to jump through.
They have a 6k sqft house with a basketball court, pool and a pool house in the prime location in West Los Angeles.
They had to join two lots to build to their liking.
And the other 80% are little to no more efficient in terms of dollars input vs services rendered.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
And there's a pretty straight line between that and government subsidies for sugar and processed foods in general, not to mention car-based infrastructure, although the latter doesn't stop other countries from not having crippling obesity rates.
The wealthy people that run insurance companies bribe our politicians to keep it that way.
Also, as other commenters mention, the specifics of how money is disbursed or spent, matters. If, say, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to massively over-charge, than the same level of care would mean a higher level of spending than in other world states.
They get that cash price amount from a tiny amount of people, 70% of that price from private insurers, 30-60% from Medicare, less from Medicaid. Even then, they have to basically litigate the bills through private insurance appeals.
If they had one payer which had a single reimbursement rate, they wouldn't have to do these shenanigans.
Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if at least part of it is the attitude that investments in these areas are "welfare" and not simply a part of the portfolio of essential services that are delivered by the state to citizens?
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...
[2]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
It's got to be desperately frustrating trying to fight this kind of thinking when you've got whole communities who have never even thought to question it.
My main hope at this point is with bottom-up type efforts. Let Mamdani show people that an effective city government can fill potholes and operate a few at-cost supermarkets. Let that be the start of citizens expecting more than chainsaw-waving and twitter meltdowns for their tax dollars.
Also speaking as a Canadian, I don't understand the distinction you're drawing.
I would say that the mainstream Canadian view is the opposite of this. We expect healthcare funding and many are supportive of the strikes when it gets cut, but we are much more likely to treat military budget as the purchase of a lot of unnecessary toys.
Social Security isn't really welfare -- it's more like a nationwide retirement plan, whereby I'm getting X back in future dollars for Y paid in now.
Medicare isn't really welfare either -- it's medical insurance that I am paying for in advance.
(Now you can argue that a percentage of SS and Medicare is welfare because there is a floor on how much you receive regardless of what you put in, though you have to have paid in for at least 10 years to be eligible to receive anything.)
So that really just leaves Medicaid and Safety Net as true welfare: 17.1%.
If anything this speaks to the cost of welfare in America.
The corollary is that many suggestions to reduce welfare spending would lead to even less actual welfare being delivered, without addressing systemic cost problems.
The reality is the US operates the world's largest social services apparatus, including the world's largest public healthcare system.
Since that party doesn’t exist I am politically homeless.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
Unpopular answer but ask your favorite AI to show the history of how taxes increased in the USA since 1913 and what those taxes were spent on. Then ask how often such programs are ever removed and the taxes are reduced and surplus given back to the people.
Related recent discussion of taxes in California [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inOci0iH4Q8 [video][15 mins]
By the way, the 1040 instructions have a pie chart like this (ref https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf, page 122). Not that most people do taxes themselves, or have a reason to read to page 122 of instructions for a single form. But still it's there and perhaps a nice gesture by the IRS.
Breaking it out into pie charts etc like this can be really helpful. In my view the real kicker with taxes is the opaqueness. Kinda like a meal card versus paying for every meal, or like using a credit card versus paying with cash, it's hard for humans to really grasp what's going on unless they're involved.
Of course it would be impractical to pay taxes separately to every waiting hand in government bureaucracy. But on the other hand maybe the number one goal shouldn't be ease of use, either. Maybe a little friction when paying for public services could be a good thing for citizens who are interested in a healthy country - my opinion.
However, not at all surprised. That stat would arguably make the most material difference to voters, if only they knew about it.
Edit: Adds another degree of pain when you consider that the CEO-to-worker pay ratio reached 281-to-1 in 2024.
If you are on a plane and they announce they are collecting “service items” people might be confused and hand over their “service weapon” if they forget that one means trash and the other means gun. Good thing we have the TSA to prevent this kind of misunderstanding.
And when it comes to that discretionary Budget, roughly 1/3 goes to the Military and 1/3 goes to Debt Servicing.
And the primary reason we have so much debt is because of the military spending, since that's our biggest expense and because the government can't borrow to fund SS and Medicare.
So basically, we taxpayers are funding a military state and subsidizing the defense industry (while being told that subsidizing any other industry is "un-American".
For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_General_Account
> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.
Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.
The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy
They build used car dealerships and strip clubs within walking distance of bases. Sailors blow thousands in an evening at the club, and then drive home in $75k vehicles purchased at predatory interest rates.
Despite significant, potentially life-changing enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses, housing stipends and more - many (or most) enlistees leave the service in debt or near penniless.
[1]: https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/why-cant-...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5772701/trump-budget-de...
Click down into a federal account and then change the drop down over the chart to "Recipient".
Cut the military budget by 50%.
I wish I could cut my taxes in half and refuse to have them go to the military budget or servicing the debt.
I'm happy for my taxes to go to all the rest (which could be increased).
Tax Wrapped 2025
>P.L. 118-50
>Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act
-$4.0B to replenish Iron Dome and David's Sling interceptors
—$1.2B for Iron Beam laser defense system development
—$3.5B in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) for Israel
—$4.4B to replenish U.S. defense articles transferred to Israel
—$2.4B for USCENTCOM operations in the region
—Funded as a supplemental outside normal appropriations
Most Americans have no idea how much money we give to this tiny nation on the other side of the world.
The federal government spends $20B per day. $5B of that is borrowed.
That said, the amount of fraud that was perpetuated here without any follow-through on enforcement is ... extremely not good.
If each claim was investigated closely before paying out, it may have resulted in higher unemployment and lower economic output.
That will be the true death knell of democracy
― Alexis de Tocqueville
...I thought I was already sufficiently terrified by the debt numbers...
Now whether that $1 in 20 years will buy anything is an entirely different story.
S&P: "AA+ with stable outlook"
Moody's: "Aa1 stable"
DBRS: "AAA stable"
In terms of FICO scores this would be ~820 or so. The US won't have any problem any time soon getting some more private sector money.
Which is just the tiniest bit worse than Germany, but not much. And it's a lot higher than France.
Standard & Poor's: AA+
Moody's: Aa1
In this case, though, the best option is probably just to take out the expletive.
edit: bring on the downvotes, israel is committng a genocide and doing it with out tax dollars.
