Question About Trump's 1999 Wealth Tax

[Free Bird]

We now stand closing in on 20 trillion in debt. Would quadrupling the rate he proposed back in the day still solve the debt in one swoop, or am I missing something?

[King]

Paying off all the debt at once is totally pointless.  It was an interesting idea by Trump in 2000 since we were on pace to pay off the debt and he just wanted to rapid the pace, but to go from 18 trillion to 0 would be unnecessarily destructive.

If you are really a fiscal hawk, you just have to shrink debt as a percentage of GDP. Nominal numbers are worthless to consider with value of currency changing over time.

Our current debt is 18.7 trillion and our nominal GDP is 16.7 trillion. If we agreed to cut deficits to under $100 billion a year for the next 10 years, by Dec 2025 our debt would be 19.7 trillion but our nominal GDP would likely be 22 trillion or so at an average growth rate of 2% nominally. That means our debt as a percentage of GDP would reduce to the point where it would be equivalent of  having only 15 trillion in debt today.  That's 4 trillion in debt reduction without having to run a single surplus.

If you continue this trend for one hundred years, you'd get to the point where our debt would be around 30 trillion, but  hedged against a 100-150 trillion GDP.  A trillion dollars would be essentially be what a billion dollars is today and therefore not really an issue.

Inflation saves lives.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Are federal wealth taxes constitutional, even?

[Taco Truck 🚚]

We now stand closing in on 20 trillion in debt. Would quadrupling the rate he proposed back in the day still solve the debt in one swoop, or am I missing something?

Problems with wealth tax have been addressed already.

[Hillary pays minimum wage]

Taxes won't solve our problems.  Our only answer is to elect real people not from the elite circles like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.  There are hundreds of others in DC from both parties.  Those rats have been the two most offensive to my American ideals is all.  Max Baucus is another crook who gets away with everything.  I'm so glad all three of them are gone.