Do you agree that it's time to raise YOUR taxes?
You want Congress to raise taxes and cut spending. You prefer corporations to be Congress’ priority for those tax increases, as well as individuals making more than $500,000 per year. That’s what you told me last week as we continued this discussion on a critical topic that Congress refuses to address: legislating more fiscally responsibly with our money.
Here’s a link to last week’s column to check the final poll results on taxes.
(Thanks to Dylan who recommended setting up a poll on solutions to our $34 trillion federal debt. And thanks to those of you who voted last week.)
Did you know that Congress hasn’t had a budget surplus since 2001? That means that Congress has entered its third straight decade of spending more of our money than the federal government takes in.
In 2001, the federal debt had reached about $5.8 trillion.
In the 23 years since, our country’s debt has added $28.5 trillion. That is how fast this has deteriorated.
Here are the tax brackets for 2001 and 2024:
I’ve heard people complaining about how much their taxes have gone up. These charts show the opposite: taxes have declined over the past two decades as the annual deficits have skyrocketed.
(No, I’m not saying that tax cuts are solely responsible. But they have added trillions to the federal debt, since politicians who supported them failed to offset revenue losses with spending reductions.)
According to last week’s poll, the majority of those who participated want to see taxes go up, at least for some people/corporations. But would you support YOUR taxes increasing if it helped pay down the federal debt?
SOMETHING ELSE…
—Here is my story on a new proposal that would require armed security at some Iowa schools, make it optional at others, provide state funding to pay for security and expand policies to allow teachers and staff to carry firearms at schools. Watch that here.
—I talked with Dr. Cody Dahl, who traded his dream of training horses to instead trying to help people understand what Donald Trump’s threat to heighten the trade war would do and why it could be helpful if you ate a LOT more nuts. Watch that conversation here.
—This Thursday in Des Moines, I’ll be moderating a discussion with author Mark Daley at Beaverdale Books. I met Mark more than 15 years ago when he worked in Iowa politics before moving to California.
His new book, “Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family,” is a raw, honest and emotional journey that Mark and his husband Jason took through the heartbreak of trying to adopt children through the foster care system. It is an eye-opening account.
There is no cost to attend the event and Mark will signing autographs of the book after our conversation. Join us if you can.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate it. I started this column as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, a group of independent writers. You can check out their latest work by clicking on the links next to their name.
A breakdown of taxes should also include Corporate Taxes, especially those who are paying nothing but are benefitting from tax dollars to make them rich! Large Cororate farm operations that are making huge profits through subcities need a cut off. Operations like ethanol plants, need to start paying taxes to reduce the expenditures the government made to help them build the very plant they are making money from! Lots of what you are showing is important, but sometimes the percentages of income that are paid in taxes would be more telling than the rates that have also bottomed out. Eisenhower spent lots of money on an interstate system of highways, but he also had a top rate of 90 percent, not 37 %. A look at the number of billionaires compared with millionaires would also be interesting when the distribution of wealth is considered. The growth in these powerful people have turned our government into a subserviant lap dog, willing to follow the money and not the will of the people. That has much to do with the government debt and the fact the books don't balance.