You all know that I hate quoting myself, right? Well I touched on a subject in my last post, but didn’t go really into depth with it. Now I’m going into a deeper hole to mine some more information. Follow along with me as I configure these numbers and come to the conclusion that…the nation is bought and owned by the wealthiest members of the nation. And that there aren’t many ways to change it.
Here’s where the thought started in the last post to recap:
“And look at Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, who makes about $20,000 every 8 hours. That’s equivalent to making $2,500 an hour if he worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; that’s a grand total of $21.9 million a year in income. He pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes. If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.
And both Romney and my million-dollar CD only pay 15% taxes, whereas I pay closer 22% tax on the money I bust my ass for. In other words, he pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes. If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million. Whereas I pay a little more than $4,600 in taxes, but if I only paid 15% in taxes, I’d pay a little more than $3,100.”
Now if we follow along with those numbers…
And if we assume that all the .1% top income earners earn Romney’s amount and pay his level of taxes and that the lower 50% of the nation that make less than $26,000 a year all make the cut-off of 26k and pay my effective tax rate of 22% than we can look at the following results.
Top .1% Population: 300,000 people
Top .1% Income Gross: $6,570,000,000,000 (that is 6.57 trillion dollars)
Top .1% Tax Payment (at 15%): $985,500,000,000 (that is 985.5 billion dollars)
Bottom 50% Population: 150,000,000 people (that is 150 million)
Bottom 50% Income Gross: $3,900,000,000,000 (that is only 3.9 trillion dollars)
Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 22%): $858,000,000,000 (yup, 858 billion dollars)
Now if we switch those tax rates around we find these numbers…
Top .1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $1,445,400,000,000 (a mighty 1.4 trillion dollars)
Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 15%): $585,000,000,000 (still a comely 585 billion dollars)
So if we just switch the tax rates, we wind up with the top .1% paying 459.9 billion dollars a year more in taxes and the bottom 50% pays 127.5 billion dollars a year less.
In total that is an increase in $332.4 billion in taxes for the government. In a period of 4 years we would increase tax revenue by more than $1.3 trillion dollars.
So if we can cut spending by 1.5 trillion dollars a year, that’d cut the budget deficit by 100 Billion dollars (i.e. .1 trillion dollars) a year, so after 4 years we would lower the national debt by 1.7 trillion dollars in 4 years just by making respectable cuts to the wasteful government spending and forcing 300 thousand people to pay the same tax rate as 150 million people who, combined, make less than the aforementioned 300 thousand people.
Now before you rant and rave at those numbers…keep in mind that we’re only looking at .1% against 50%. If we look at Mitt Romney’s cronies among the top full 1% and realize that they must make around similar amounts as him. So if we assume that the remainder of the top 1%, the other .9%, make marginally less than him we can create an even fancier number.
We’ll calculate it like this: We’ll assume that the top 1% makes, as a combined average, 20% less than Romney’s income per person. That gives us the following numbers…
Top 1% Population: 3,000,000 (million) people
Top 1% Income Gross: $52,560,000,000,000 (that would be 52.6 trillion dollars a year)
Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): 7,884,000,000,000 (7.9 trillion dollars a year in taxes)
Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $11,563,200,000,000 (yes…11.6 trillion dollars a year in tax income)
So if we raise effective taxes from 15% to 22% on the top 10%, using our numbers, we raise tax income (after accounting for lowering taxes on the bottom 50% from 22% to 15% tax) by $3,551,700,000,000. In other words: 3.6 trillion dollars a year.
After 4 years, we’d have 14.4 trillion dollars a year, even without the spending cuts. If we manage to cut spending by $1.5 trillion a year, we’d end up with $14.8 trillion dollars more than we get every year, now, in four years’ time.
So in the term of one single president, we could pay down over 97% of the national debt. In the same president’s second term, we would erase the national debt in the first few months of his (or her) second term and by the end of the second term we would have a national surplus of 14.3 trillion dollars.
So in 8 years’ time we would not only erase the debt, but acquire a surplus almost equivalent to the debt as of writing this post ($15.2 trillion).
Now explain to me why we can’t have universal free health care and have this huge deficit, again?
~RCS
Richard C. Shaffer 