Where would you like your tax dollars to go?

[popeyespappy]

Find out how much it costs and get that back in tax, preferably from the extremely wealthy.

According to Forbe's latest list the combined net worth of America's 536 billionaires is $3.126 trillion. That's $134 billion short of paying our healthcare bill for 2016 alone. Taxing the rich isn't going to cut it by itself.

According to the chart I posted earlier the fed got $1.1 trillion in social security and medicare revenue last year. The rates for those taxes are 12.4% for social security and 2.9% for medicare. The numbers get funny here because social security taxes are only collected on the first $127,200 in regular earnings and medicare is collected on all regular earnings. Capital gains aren't burdened with social security and medicare taxes. Anyway let's just say the medicare portion of that $1.1 trillion was $250 billion. That means we would have needed to raise another $3.1 trillion to pay our 2016 healthcare costs. That would take a increase in the medicare tax rate from 2.9% to 35.96%. That's 35.96% on top of the 12.4% social security tax, 10-39.6% income tax rate, plus whatever else people pay in state and local taxes. Not to mention the social security fund is now operating in the red so that rate needs to go up too. Most Americans (not just the extremely wealthy) would be looking at federal tax burdens between 50 and 80%. That would crash our economy and probably yours too.

It can't be done without lowering costs. Removing profit margins from the equation wouldn't be enough by itself to make it workable either so we have to find other areas to reduce costs. I'm open to suggestions on how to do that...