 It is mathematically impossible to tax our way out of this. In order to stabilize the debt long-term, you need non-interest savings that gradually rise to about 6% of GDP outside of interest. I did a report last year on taxing the rich that showed that realistically, you can only get about 1% of GDP in higher revenues if you set all upper income taxes at the highest possible rates at the revenue maximizing level and you adjusted for the economic damage that would create, you'd get 1% to 2% of GDP. Just to put a finer point on this, if you seized every dollar of every billionaire's wealth in America, their home, their car, their stocks, their vacation houses, their yachts, their businesses, you could fund the government one time for nine months. That's it. If you assessed 100% tax rates over 500,000 a year, you still wouldn't balance the budget. So, taxing the rich should be on the table because everything needs to be on the table, but when I hear lawmakers down to people on Twitter say all we have to do is tax the rich and it'll pay for everything, that is spectacularly mathematically false. Right, and you show actually that according to OECD data and the OECD are advanced economies, the United States actually has the most progressive tax code. We have the most progressive. So, we are taxing the rich, the rich pay a higher percentage of government revenue in the US than in any other OECD country. Substantially more, and it's because we tax the rich at a similar level as other countries. In fact, our highest rates are actually higher for other countries, but we tax the non-wealthy so much less than other countries that it makes us more progressive. Right. Yeah, and it's what about 10%, the upper 10% of income earners in the US pay about 90% of the tax. The upper 20%, the highest 20% of earners pay 90% of all income taxes. The bottom half collectively pays zero. Yeah. So, does that mean in order to balance the budget that we have to tax the middle class or we have to tax more, a wider range of income earners? Here's the part that makes me really unpopular with all our audiences. When you, if you try to build a stable budget for the next 30 years, and I don't mean stable, I don't mean balance the budget. I mean just one small enough deficits that the debt share of GDP stays at about 100%. You can't really get there on spending cuts alone. You have to cut that 5.5% of GDP. You can't really find 5.5% of GDP in reasonable cuts. You're gonna have to have some revenue. And if taxing the rich is limited, there's going to be higher middle class taxes. This is just a mathematical reality. As I explained in my dispatch article, you can't stabilize the debt with revenues at 17% of GDP. Spending is going to 30. You're not gonna get spending all the way down that low and you can't get there from taxing the rich. So middle class taxes are going to rise. Is that primarily, where is that gonna be? Is that, I mean, part of it, and I guess this wouldn't necessarily be middle class, but payroll taxes, which get capped for social security at what, 130? 168,000. 168,000. Inflation's been helping it. But so that, the caps get taken off of that and that will increase some, but that's not middle class people. Like what will it mean? That's the taxing the rich part. Yeah, so if, what's the median household income now? 76,000, something like that. What, you know, what will they be paying in taxes, you know, 10 years down the road versus now? It remains to be seen. I can't give a number. I think people are surprised to hear though that the median earning family in America today pays an effective income tax rate of 2%. And people say, I pay more than that. If you actually adjust for what they actually pay with the child credit and sometimes the EITC, the middle earning family pays an effective income tax rate of 2%, and then they pay an effective payroll tax of about 10% when you count the employer portion. So they do pay payroll, but it's going to go up from that. And the question is, eventually is, are we gonna do most of this through payroll taxes and a value added tax, which is like a national sales tax or through income taxes? In Europe, that is everything, right? We are the only country in the OECD that does not have a value added tax. I would like to keep it that way. Right, why? What's bad about value added taxes? Value added taxes are actually more efficient than income taxes. If you're starting a government from scratch because you're taxing consumption, the danger though is value added taxes are a cash cow. Once you start with a 1% rate, it's so easy to raise it to higher rates and collect a huge amount of revenue. And my concern is, I wouldn't mind replacing the income tax with a value added tax, but I don't wanna get to the point where families are paying large income taxes and large value added taxes because then you're burying families. If we're gonna, I know a lot of conservatives have said if we're gonna switch to a consumption tax, the income tax needs to be destroyed, burned and salted the earth first.