balancing the budget
does anyone do taxes by hand any more? it's all done by computer. or should be. tax calculations no longer need to be simplified to the point where they can be done on paper. great. so here's my plan for balancing the budget. let's suppose we stick with an income tax and can't do the stuff tax i proposed last blog. in order to balance the budget we need to raise enough money in tax revenues to equal the amount congress spends every year. many people have adjustable mortgage rates on their house. so why not pay an adjustable tax rate? ie the tax rate gets set based on how much we need. so how would it work? the model i'm choosing pretty much has two parameters: deduction and slope. i imagine the deduction to be fixed beforehand. like say if you make less than $10,000 you don't pay any taxes. the slope is the rate at which the tax rate graduates with income. this would asymptotically approach 100%. every year we'd adjust the slope so income matches out go. simple, no? timmer for president.