Well, Fred, if we make up our own facts it will be hard to have a honest conversation!
The top 10% of taxpayers who fit your criteria have an adjusted Gross Income of approx. 4 TRILLION dollars.
The projected budget deficit in 2015 to 2020 is approx. 500-700 billion per year.
This means we could balance the budget 7X over with your suggestion...each year!
C'mon, Fred, time to come back to earth. That is a oft repeated talking point with absolutely no basis in fact - as are a lot of the usual slogans. Do the math
C student in mathematics?
The combined US income is 12,357,113,000. (SOURCE:
http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm)
The top 1%, which included not just billionaires and millionaires, but any couple making a combined income of over $350K is 24% of that, or 2,965,707,120, so you're already down 1.1 trillion out of the gate. (SOURCE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kristof.html)
"During FY 2010, the federal government collected approximately $2.16 trillion in tax revenue." (SOURCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget)
The CBO projected total outlays of $3.708 trillion for a deficit of $1.48 trillion for 2011 and the actual deficit came at at $1.56 trillion (SOURCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_federal_budget)
The top 1% pays:
39.5% of the income tax ( 1.0915 trillion x .395) = .4311425 trillion
57% of corporate income tax (.1811 trillion x .57) = .103227 trillion
4.1% of payroll taxes (.8111 trillion x .0041) = .0332551 trillion
4.7% of ad-valorem taxes (.1299 trillion x .041) = .00053259
For a final total of $568,157,190 billion, or the top 1% pay 26.3% of the total income tax.
(SOURCES:
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/year_revenue_2011USbn_13bs1n_10603040#usgs302 and
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...e-bachmann-says-top-1-percent-pay-40-percent/)
So, if the top 1% is going to pay their current tax burden plus the $1.56 trillion deficit, they'd have a total tax burden of $2.13 trillion, or 71.77% just to balance the budget.
Now of course you still have that final Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, the federal debt at $16 trillion dollars. So if you increase their tax burden to 100% (and I'm NOT using adjusted gross income either), it will take 20 years to pay off the national debt.
Keep a few things in mind.
1. We haven't limited this to millionaire and billionaires. A couple making more that $350K or an individual making $250K has been financially raped by this process, so your heart surgeon is now a pauper. Lets hope no one you know ever needs surgery.
2. There's no adjusted gross income. We've just put the 1% over a subway grate in a refrigerator box.
3. The debt will never get paid down because in Year Two, there is no economy to speak of anyway.
Just out of curiosity, if you don't worry about paying down the debt, but just tax the 1% at 71.77%, the net result is $837,219.120 shared by 1,379,822 people for an average income of $606K.
No more millionaires or billionaires. But also no more Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Ford.
And because I wasn't using adjusted gross income, guess who else is out of business? Nearly every farm in the US. Now we're all poor, homeless and starving.
If this doesn't point out that we dug ourselves into a hole that is impossible to get out of, nothing will.