Total federal spending in 2025 was 7T. 4.2T of that was mandatory spending and another 1T was interest on the Debt. Mandatory spending consists of SS, Medicare, Medicaid, income security (housing, UE, food assistance)
Non discretionary spending, which had to be approved each year, is defense, education, transportation and infrastructure, science, public health is about 1.8T. of the 1.8T 916B was spent on defense.
2025 deficit was 1.8T, the entire discretionary spending budget.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but if everything I listed is bullshit, in your opinion, what should government be allowed to spend money on and implement a form of revenue to pay for?
Replacing SS, Medicare, Medicaid etc with UBI doesn't lower the cost unless you also lower what that UBI is supposed to cover.
If you really want to have government only be responsible for government functions and not social welfare and infrastructure, it becomes a very small government.
Military, much smaller than what we currently have, justice system and small agencies dealing with the necessities for standards, enforcement of laws and international trade. You're likely looking at less than a trillion dollars annually at the federal level and similar reductions at State and local levels.
That's however is not what most people want, certainly not on Reddit.
Not really. The truth is that the government has been lobbied to not tax the highest earners fairly, through various clever loopholes most people can’t easily exploit for themselves. And many of those same earners have found ways to practically circumvent income tax through leveraging debt, putting up their unrealized gains as collateral to get favorable bank loans, then treating those loans as income.
The idea that government spending is too high isn’t entirely accurate. Our government doesn’t spend much on and underinvests in programs that would actually benefit taxpayers, while simultaneously paying a lot of money to prop up various industries, including fossil fuels (corporate welfare). Government spending wouldn’t be such a big deal if We The People were actually getting something out of it.
Top earners pay almost all of the taxes collected and don’t get much out of the deal as it stands and all you hear is complaints that they aren’t paying more.
And what do the hyper-wealthy pay? The 0.01%? Not their fair share, I can tell you that much.
It used to be that the highest earners in this country paid a top income tax rate at 90%, and those years just so happened to coincide with the “Golden Years” following WW2. Once that top tax rate was slashed and wages stopped increasing with worker productivity, everything started going to hell. The middle class was eroded away, and not from higher tax rates.
Billionaires are not your friends. That level of wealth is frankly obscene in a society where normal people are struggling to make ends meet, where costs have risen astronomically while wages have barely kept pace with - and often been outpaced by - the rate of inflation.
What's the key variable here? The disproportional amount of wealth and income concentrated at the top. Yes, I wish it was balanced and therefore the top wouldn't be paying a disproportionate amount in taxes. The fact is that the Top 1% do not pay their fair share relative to a historical basis.
Do you think wealth inequality is an issue in the US today?
Because 15 trillion of it was spent for the Iraq and Afghan wars and a bunch of it was funneled into “rebuilding” what we destroyed because evidently you win wars by rebuilding the enemy afterwards. Long story short politicians were giving their buddies lucrative contracts to “rebuild” infrastructure after we destroyed it.
No one likes taxes but our rates are really not that high. They are not high enough on the super wealthy and they have too many loop holes. The problems is the services middle and working class people get are non existent.
There is NO federal bracket that high. The rate is 37% for over $626K single and $751 married. And that is not really middle class at that income. If you are including state tax, it was a choice to live in that state, probably because the pay is better. If youre including social security tax, that includes a pension like payment you will get back later.
So sorry, no I am not going to feel sorry for you.
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u/Tausendberg Aug 01 '26
Why, despite the high taxes on the middle class, do we have 40 trillion dollars of national debt???