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Memories of the 28th Century

Improving Life in America

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Some people were commenting on the size of the military budget of the United States of America. I simply agreed that it is rather large, but I thought a little more about it and realized that the more than six hundred billion was less than $2000 per capita, and that’s not all that much, but it’s still more than I can afford. And it is also more than most Americans can afford, so, the country is adding more and more debt every year. If we were only wasting a couple hundred dollars per person annually on the military, I could understand it, but two thousand is a lot more than we should be spending, but it isn’t so much that we could do much with it, but it is causing the national debt to grow year after years, and that is up to $23 trillion, and that is quite a lot, more than $75,000 per person. If we paid off the debt, everyone would be that much richer, but it wouldn’t happen all at once, so it would barely be noticed. Even if we used the total military budget to pay down debt, it would take almost forty years to eliminate the debt, and we’d have to take on more debt to pay that amount.

The problem is that tax law is very complicated. The IRS collects about 3.5 trillion from an economy that has a national product of about 5.35 trillion. That means that the taxes are about two thirds of the income. That is not right. The government should not be taking two thirds of the money. We have to get the government to survive on a small fraction of the GNP.

Tax simplification would be nice, and it might even lead to greater tax collections, but there would be big changes, and some parts of the economy would be hurt when their income source dried up before they could start getting income from a different source. Paring the federal government down to size would help, but the states have been neglecting parts of their bailiwick, because the feds were involved, and it would take time to get the states back up to speed and size. Some states would not want to expand to fill all of the roles that the feds fill now.

The biggest downside would be unemployment among accountants and IRS workers, but some of them could switch to the improved tax scheme, so maybe there wouldn't be much unemployment, or maybe the accountants could do something useful instead.

The longer we allow a bloated federal government to go on, the worse the situation will become. It would be better to take the pain now, so that we could recover sooner.

Updated 01-21-2020 at 05:09 PM by PeterL

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