I Want YOU to pay for YOUR government!
Who is paying for the Federal government? Perhaps one of the most illustrative ways of answering that question is not to think in terms of percentage points, but how long the government can run on different people's contribution. From "Uncle Sam's Fiscal Year Disaster" by James R. Herrigan and Antony Davies:
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the federal budget plays out over the calendar year. By comparing how much different groups of taxpayers pay, we can get a clear picture of who actually pays for government, and how much.
So who does pay?
Let’s start with the poorest Americans. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest figures, the poorest 20 percent of Americans paid three-tenths of one percent of all federal taxes. This year, tax revenues cover only 70 percent of federal spending, so that segment of the population paid for two-thousandths of federal spending.
If the government’s fiscal year started on January 1, the poorest 20 percent would pay for all the government spending from midnight through 6:30 p.m. on New Year’s Day. In other words, they would be done paying for government at about the same time your New Year’s Eve hangover was lifting. For sports fans, it would be during half-time of the Rose Bowl.
The next poorest 20 percent of Americans pay enough to fund the government for the next 10 days, taking us to January 11. Middle-income Americans pay for a little over three weeks, taking us to February 4. In other words, when half of Americans pool their taxes together, the total only pays for 35 days of government spending.
Those from middle-income up to, but not including, the wealthiest 10 percent pay for February 5 through May 2. We’re only four months into the year, and 90 percent of Americans have paid all they are going to pay toward the government’s spending.
Those in the top 10 percent but not the top one percent pay for May 3 through July 17. The top one percent pays for the 56 days, from July 17 through September 10. And for 2012, September 10 was Deficit Day. That’s the day that the tax revenues ran out. From September 11 through December 31, every dime the government spends is borrowed money. The people who will pay for this lion’s share of the year—112 days—can’t vote because they haven’t been born yet. At least for these people, this is taxation without representation.
The absurdity of it all is that despite half of America only funding the Federal government they have voted for for only a month and despite the top one percent of the income distribution paying almost double that, people still beleive that they can self-richteously assert that the rich are not paying a fair share. Gone is the classical notion of citizenship in which the citizen is responsible for bearing the costs of the government and that it is by bearing the costs of the government that they are just in enjoying the benefits of citizenship that government provides. Instead, we have a notion of citizenship in which it is acceptable simply to give someone else the bill because they somehow deserve to pay for what somebody else consumes.
Another dimension of this problem is the perverse incetives it creates. When citizens can vote for more government and recieve tangible benefits from that decision without having to pay tangible costs, there is all the incentive in the world for people to vote for more government. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why just about four month's of the government's costs are pushes onto those who have no voice in the process: no one wants to pay the costs of government. Far too many are living in a fantasy world in which they may argue we need government to pave the roads, or to keep the peace, or to regulate the banks, but they're no where to be found when it comes time to pay. When the tax-man comes along, everyone is oh so quick to talk about how the 1% needs to pay more or about how paying the costs of government would hurt the middle call resulting in a situation in which no one pays for a third of it. Despite the deficit being a relatively popular issue, almost no one is talking about the fundamental crux of democratic public financing: we, the People, must pay for our government.
I think that the only way out of this is when we finally accept that the costs of government cannot be pushed onto a minority of America. A vote for more government, right or wrong, has to result in a vote for higher taxes for everyone. The middle class cannot afford higher taxes? Well then, the middle class cannot afford the government that they've been so happy not to pay for which in turn is a perfectly legitimate reason not to vote for it.
I thus have a modest proposal: Instead of borrowing money next fiscal year, the Federal government calculates how much money it needs to opperates, equally divides it up by the population and sends each American citizen their share of the bill. Watch how quickly paying for the deficit becomes the number one issue across politics.
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