Obama: Raise Taxes, Capital Gains – "For Purposes of Fairness"

JTPNY guesstimate: $55 trillion - Social security, medicaid, medicare, future obligations $14.4 trillion - National debt owed by public $16 trillion - US insurance guarantees Total: USA 85.4 Trillion in debt 0r $285,000 per person Michael Tanner's (Cato Institute) estimates the nation's total debt -- including unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security -- is $119.5 trillion -- $400,000 per capital

“But even if one assumes that taxes can be raised without having any impact on economic growth, taxing the rich still wouldn’t get us out of our budget hole — because the hole is quite simply bigger than the amount of revenue we could raise from taxing the rich even if there were no disincentives,” Tanner writes in a Cato policy analysis titled, “Bankrupt: Entitlements and the Federal Budget.”

“To put it in admittedly oversimplified perspective: our current obligations, including both implicit and explicit debt, total more than 900 percent of GDP. The combined wealth of everyone in the United States who earns at least $1 million per year equals roughly 100 percent of GDP. Therefore, you could confiscate the entire wealth of every millionaire in the United States and still barely make a dent in the amount we will owe.”

Michael Tanner, Cato Institute, “Bankrupt: Entitlements and the Federal Budget.”

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“Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. …You don’t raise taxes in a recession.” –President Obama to NBC’s Chuck Dodd, Aug. 2009