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John --
With the House's passage of the Big,
Beautiful Bill driving a conversation on the national debt, this
past week we focused on how you feel about that topic and the best
ways to tackle it.
Should we cut spending? Should we
increase taxes? Should we cut taxes to spur growth? In this
week's Controlling What You
Can series, we let you decide the relative
focus between increasing revenue and decreasing expenditures.
Your answers surprised us!
Let's start by looking at the slider,
which asked about the relative focus between raising revenue and
decreasing expenditures to work on repaying the national debt. Coupled
with the poll results, we have a few interesting takeaways!
First, the vast majority of you believe
that we should both raise more revenue and decrease expenditures to
tackle our debt. It was a nearly even split between which "side" there
was more of a focus on. For those who believe we
should only focus on one of these two areas, raising revenue
won out. However, we think it's safe to say that the vast majority of
Forwardists think that all options need to be considered and a mix of
strategies will be needed to start paying down the debt.
Second, about 1/6 people who responded to
the poll believe that we should use tax cuts to spur growth as the
primary means to tackle the debt. That paled in comparison to those of
you who wanted to increase taxes or reduce spending in various
areas.
The single most selected option was
raising income tax on high earners - and we'll dig more into that when
we discuss the ideas that you all posted in our poll thread.
Finally, between cutting Social Security
for the wealthy or cutting defense spending, the majority of you
thought defense spending was the better area to focus on for spending
cuts. In fact, cutting defense spending was essentially tied with
increasing income tax on high earners in the poll!
Looking at the specific thoughts, ideas, and policies
submitted via our website and on X, some key themes reflecting this
split emerged:
Simplify The Tax Code
- More comments were left on simplifying the tax code to eliminate
loopholes than any other topic. The tax code is seen as a way to
"game" paying taxes, and a cleaner code is seen as a way to ensure
more equitable taxation across income brackets.
Reduce Regulatory Complexity
- You all called for the reduction in regulatory complexity to both
allow business growth and to reduce government overhead. That's an
idea to both increase revenue and decrease expenditures!
Reduction of Spending & Increasing High-End
Taxes
- Whether its military budgets, entitlements, or overhead, many of
you called for cuts.
- You also called for adding in more tax brackets on the high end to
reflect the shifting reality of incomes in the current economy.
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