(Cartoon image from Carlson in 2009 about another unsustainable moment in our sophisticated national financial system).
We have heard those words before. We think it was around the big real estate collapse back in 2008. We had one of those surreal mornings back then when someone mentioned the Zillow prices on the condo we owned then had fallen by a hundred grand, seemingly overnight.
It actually took a couple days, but we were not paying enough attention to determine if it was twenty or thirty grand every twenty-four hours.
That is not dissimilar to the numbers that floated by last week in what we call the tyranny of Here-And-Now. Those were the numbrs that said each of us “taxpayers”- they carefully did not say “citizens” on that- was each on the hook for an equivalent of that slug of cash for our share of the National Debt.
We squirmed around and tried to figure out how we would pay our “fair share” of the IOU’s run up to cover the debts incurred by other people for other important things. There was some laughter about that, since some of us get Medicare and Social Security without blushing, but you can see how the situation is exemplified by the perspective on where the cash is coming from and where it is going.
Most of us could come up with the necessary amount, though it would probably take a couple working days to have it in a digital package. Longer, if it had to be in stacks of actual currency. The people at Feakonomics have informed us a trillion dollar stack of currency bills- denomination unspecified- would be about 67 miles in height. Our national debt this morning is therefore, (35 x 67= 224.5 miles).
The Moon is reported reliably to be about 251,000 miles from Earth, so regardless of denomination, we have a quarter million miles of dollars before we can walk there in any comfort.
We should quote what they said about some of the New York financial institutions in the last time a major fiscal bubble inflated and burst: “We have to bail them out. They are too big to Fail!”
We appear to be in the same situation this morning, though the scope, like a walk on dollar bills to the lunar surface, seems a little unlikely. We are no longer speaking about an old and venerable financial institution. We are talking about the one that really used to be too enormous to permit to collapse. And yet it is. Imagine that- we are outspending our income (“taxes”) by another trillion every hundred days. That amounts to an additional ten percent of the total debt every year. We would take that as a decent investment opportunity, though recall bitching about numbers only slightly bigger when we had to pay it ourselves in the Carter Administration for our first house.
We hear the word “sustainable” fairly frequently these days. It is a magic word that is momentary in duration while promising some eternal steady state. We went to the Tax Foundation to do a quick check on numbers. They claim to be non-partisan in orientation, and we were hoping to hear an answer for how we might at least begin to slow the pace of the juggernaut’s advance.
The silence on that matter, as they say, is “deafening.” The latest statistics from the Infernal Revenue System are from 2021 due to the size of the stacks of cash involved. There are some microscopic adjustments that accompany the mountain of IOUs: at a Trillion every hundred days, those numbers are $12 Trillion dollars ago. Back in the immediate aftermath of the Covid panic, the top 1 percent of taxpayers income rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021.
Within that aggregate ttal, the share of federal income taxes paid by the “one percenters” rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent. If you haven’t been counting, that means every one of us lucky ones also carries a couple other people along on the strength (and thickness) of our individual wallets.
Which actually means, of course, the 1% of taxpayers are not a hundred grand in debt, but an additional 54.2% of the total, since more than half of us are paying nothing. We understand that is the thing we hear about called “Equity.”
If you loosen some of the responsibility, just to play that “fairness” angle, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.
That is the principle of “progressive taxation.” It always seems a little fairer in the initial concept phase than when the government person is actually going through our wallets or purses.
That is the part where paying for one or two other residents of our nation turns into three or four. It is obviously not sustainable in terms of keeping the enterprise going. With that being self-evident, the strange part is that no one- none, zero- are talking about what we might do to avoid a stunningly ugly collapse that could leave half of us without sustenance.
It strikes us that someone might propose collecting a little more from those who are currently paying nothing while spending a little less on benefits for everyone. We hear a lot about saving “democracy” these days, which is another of those peculiar aspects of life in our United States.
The people who rebelled against the English King had an extended chat in their convention about the potential inherent tyranny of majority rule in which the majority could vote themselves benefits produced from other people’s income. Their answer was to dilute that power through a representative form of government governed by a set of agreed and universal principals.
They called it a “Constitutional Republic.” They embedded similar leveling factors in the three branches of the government so constituted: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Institutions like the Electoral College- the one we often hear about reforming to the “popular vote” was intended to balance the raw power of the larger colonies with the smaller ones- say, New York versus Delaware- to ensure that the people of Manhattan could not eternally rule over the citizens of Wilmington.
We are on the verge of a quarter Millennium into this experiment. It has had its moments, both good and bad, but generally has produced one of the ore successful periods in the history of our Species. We have now arrived at the moment when the two wolves turn to one another over the back of the sheep and discuss what might be on the menu for dinner.
The bill is coming due, and is now headed for our table. It might be time to look around and see who our dining companions are likely to be, you know?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com