I can't has cheezburger

I’m tired of hearing people quibble over who’s getting unjustly taxed. Here’s a simple system for calculating one’s tax burden. This will cause the budget to always be balanced and unambiguously make sure everyone is paying their fair share of taxes. Best of all, it ensures that even when there is a wealth gap, our government will not engage in deficit spending because the taxes aren’t properly collected.

Suppose you are rich and you earned 1% of the total amount of money earned in the US this year. As such, you are going to pay 1% of the US’s total tax burden. If you earned 0.00001% of the nation’s wealth this year, you pay 0.00001% of the total taxes.  How much are total taxes? Simple. Total taxes are whatever our budget is.  Done!

But hey, what about our debt? Simple enough. Let’s decide how much time we want to spend paying this debt down.  I propose we pick something longer, like 100 years (we don’t need to make it a 30 year thing like a mortgage, the US is going to live a lot longer than a human will, and can thus hold debt for longer).  We simply take the total amount that we are going to pay off each year and divvy that up the same way and append it to tax burden and it will get paid in this same proportional way.

The biggest question at this point deals with what things you can deduct from the amount of earned income that is taxable. Truth be told, I’m not sure how to handle this, but I think we’d be best starting off with a clean slate and allowing absolutely no deductions. That prevents people (and businesses) from shifting the tax burdens away from themselves and it keeps our tax code clean and simple (also difficult to corrupt).