Ending the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $250K will bring in an estimated $850 billion over 10 years. That’s a lot of money. There’s just one little problem. $85B a year doesn’t mean much when paying on a trillion dollar annual deficit. Even the whole $850 billion doesn’t bridge a single year’s budget gap. Here’s a graph of the deficit:
But deficit is not debt. The deficit is the annual shortfall between income and expenditure. The debt is the accumulated deficits combined. Currently, the US debt is a staggering $15.8 trillion dollars. That’s 15,800 billion. In that light, you can eliminate ALL of the Bush tax cuts and the result is utterly insignificant, a worthless gesture and a waste of time and energy.
The entire discussion of Bush tax cuts is distraction. The real battle is cutting spending to match with reasonable taxation rates and finding a sustainable middle-ground. But spending cuts are not even a part of the discussion. I must be feverish… did I say “reasonable taxation rates”? Ack!