Destroying Medicare to Balance the Budget is a False Narrative. We Have a Revenue Problem.The United States Is a Low-Tax Country
Ten Charts that Prove the United States Is a Low-Tax Country ( see above).
Our Citizens and Corporations Pay Much Less Than They Once Did and Much Less Than in Most Other Countries.
The United States is a low-tax country. That’s true for individuals and for corporations, and it’s true whether you compare us to other countries or the America of the past. No matter how you slice it the conclusion is the same.
Conservatives like to claim that our budget deficits are purely a “spending problem.” Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “We don’t have this problem because we tax too little. We have it because we spent too much.”
It’s a popular talking point, but it simply isn’t true. Deficits do not stem from spending levels alone. They are the product of a mismatch between spending and revenue. And when revenue is as low as ours is, you end up with big deficits.
Recently, President Obama met with a group of House Republicans to discuss the federal budget and the national debt. During the course of that meeting, the president noted, correctly, that taxes today are even lower than they were under President Ronald Reagan. This fact was met with “a lot of ‘eye-rolling’” from the Republicans. They didn’t believe him.
This anecdote suggests that perhaps the reason conservatives think we don’t have a revenue problem is because they don’t know the facts. Taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan. They’re lower today than they’ve been in 60 years. And they’re lower than they are in most developed countries.
We do have a debt problem coming down the road. That debt problem is the result of an aging population, rising health care costs, and, yes, revenue levels that are too low.
Michael Linden is the Director for Tax and Budget Policy at American Progress, Seth Hanlon is Director of Fiscal Reform for CAP's Doing What Works project, and Jordan Eizenga is a Policy Analyst with the Economic Policy team at American Progress.
Amazing what trash becomes a national narrative, pushed along by the so-called liberal media. As of today in order to be a'serious adult" one has to beleive that our national finances are in such diaarry we must destroy or severely cripple programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because the deficit is high. One of the reasons for that is simple: The Bush tax cuts and a low tax on capital gains. In other words we have a revenue problem. Republicans, the people who lost 17 trillion dollars of America's wealth in the Great Recession which begin in 2007, claim taxes are too high. How often do conservatives have to burn America before people get tired of being burned. Time to say enough with the kind of BS spoon feed the American public by serial lying snake oil salesman like Mitch McConnell(R-KY) and the Anti-America stooges at Fox News.
