You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the USA is bankrupt and we owe more and more money each month than the flow of tax revenue can cover
Indeed, to figure that out you have to NOT be very smart. Because it's not true.
The fact is that we could cover all our costs -- even the super-bloated, excessive military costs, which are running at $700 billion per year BEFORE you add in the $50 billion for homeland security and even more for the various other military operations which are 'hidden' outside the DoD budget, in places like the Energy Department and the US program to sell weapons to foreign countries -- if we returned to the tax rates of the Eisenhower era (adjusted for inflation).
Under General Eisenhower's administration, the top tax rates for the richest, the equivalent of today's billionaries, were 90%... 92% (depending on which year). There were some tax breaks available, but even if used to the max, they still paid around 45%.
The main problem we have is that the richest 1% are being taxed way, way too little. Working stiffs pay 6.2% in payroll tax off the top, and then a minumum rate of 10% federal income tax on top of that; the middle class pays rates which total up to mearly 50%.
-- but your average superrich person living on dividends and capital gains pays a *maximum* of 15% federal income tax, and no payroll tax. Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and has noted the unfairness. I do the accounting for people who are benefitting from these "el cheapo" tax rates, which were put in by George W. Bush.
The even richer, the 0.1%, pay even lower rates due to use of clever tricks. Of course, very large corporations pay essentially 0% in income tax, because they can use "business deductions". Yet these very large corporations are often used as personal piggybanks by their CEOs and boards.
Now, I think we ought to rein in the super-bloated military costs too. We are now spending approximately the same amount on the US military as every other country combined spends on their militaries -- and that's including some questionable accounting, because the Chinese "military budget" includes a bunch of civilian projects which are "owned" by their military. We could cut our military budget to the size of the next largest, China's -- $143 billion per year -- and obviously have enough military. Or we could cut it to the size of Russia's, $72 billion per year.
But the fact is that the main problem is that the very rich -- the richest 1% now control one-third of the nation's wealth, and half of the 'financial assets' -- are not paying much of anything in taxes. Then, of course, they demand that everyone else suffer and have government services cut, because the government is supposedly "bankrupt".
Don't buy into the **** they're selling. The budgetary problems in the US have three sources: (1) failing to tax the rich, (2) a bloated military budget and unnecessary wards, (3) massive levels of overpricing and fraud in the medical industry, which is raising the costs of Medicare (which was *prohibited* from negotiating drug prices by George W. Bush, in a sweetheart deal for the pharmaceutical industry). Those are the ONLY three problems with the US budget.
Anything done to the rest of the federal budget, other than those three things, will have zero impact on it, basically. If the most dishonest of the Republicans are allowed to slash and burn the rest of the budget, they'll be left with ONLY the problem sections, and then the country really WILL go bankrupt -- maybe at that point we can simply repuidate the debt and start a new country with honest political parties, and with a well-funded passenger rail system.
