But yeah, having to pay your debts do suck

Why, in your view, doesn't the same thing happen to them?

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...

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.

Standard & Poor's: AA+

Moody's: Aa1

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

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.

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.

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).

Click down into a federal account and then change the drop down over the chart to "Recipient".

[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/INTERAC...

― Alexis de Tocqueville

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.

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.

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.

That said, the amount of fraud that was perpetuated here without any follow-through on enforcement is ... extremely not good.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

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...

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.

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

Now whether that $1 in 20 years will buy anything is an entirely different story.

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.

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.

The wealthy people that run insurance companies bribe our politicians to keep it that way.

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.

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.

Debt payments and defense budget increases add up.

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.

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.

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.

If each claim was investigated closely before paying out, it may have resulted in higher unemployment and lower economic output.

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

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.

Also speaking as a Canadian, I don't understand the distinction you're drawing.

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.

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.

And the other 80% are little to no more efficient in terms of dollars input vs services rendered.

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 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.

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.

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.

Only to those who paid into the system and far less than they personally could have earned on investing the same dollars.

It’s hard getting normies to admit that if soft drinks weren’t so heavily subsidized by the government at every step of manufacture and distribution, there would be less overall obesity.

No there isn't. Sugar subsidy accounts for 1.7 cents per 12-ounce can of soda. Soda in the US is generally inelastic, and research has shown that a 10% increase in price results in lessss than a 5% decrease in consumption. Americans just like sugar and sitting, culturally.

Can you explain this reasoning without implying American political leaders (or perhaps broader society) are racist?

As a counterpoint France, Germany, Canada and Australia are far from homogeneous, but offer far stronger social safety nets than the US. IIRC, 1 in 4 Australians were born elsewhere.

According to OECD data, US healthcare spending in 2023 was 28% from government schemes, 55% from health insurance, 11% out-of-pocket, and 5% from other sources. For most countries, the health insurance category is further split into compulsory and voluntary categories, but that distinction does not really exist in the US.

All US health insurance spending is reported in the compulsory health insurance category. Probably because the bulk of the spending is from employment-based insurance, which is effectively mandatory. (You usually can't opt out and take cash instead.) Naive aggregators then combine government spending and compulsory insurance and report that as public spending.

I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.

I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.

TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.

Again, percentage of government money that goes to social programs is less relative to military, but only as a percentage. Look at things like spending on public healthcare (Medicare / Medicaid) or public education, America spends as much as social democracies in absolute terms. Just relative terms its less because we're a wealthy country and produce a lot of wealth that we tax. It's not a money problem

We can't really have this conversation from the mindset that the status quo is inherently apolitical. The US spends more than those "social democracies" on the military in both absolute and relative terms. Since total spending is the same, that means we also spend less on social programs in relative terms. These are all political choices and refusing to revisit a previous political choice is an active political choice.

Additionally, a lot of these programs will pay out beyond what you've personally put in - programs like Medicaid are nearly entirely social subsidies to ease poverty and financial distress, so I'm not certain where you'd find the money to pay for them if not looking at either other people's taxes or debt.

As a taxpayer I expect the money I give to the government to be evident in some social projects but I don't personally expect that for each dollar I pay that I'd see a dollar in benefit to me personally. I have a belief that I indirectly benefit from the expenditure of charitable safety net programs even if I never expect to collect from them directly - the improvement in the lives of those around me is to my personal benefit by making society more just and egalitarian as well as reducing the incentive for crime which is a difficult to measure but observable direct benefit to myself.

The fact that so much of our budget goes to debt servicing is probably my personal biggest objection as it is effectively just a wealth extraction from our earn national budget to some select individuals.

I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.

It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.

Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the common citizen for so long is up for debate.