Basically unchanged for 70+ years, and far lower historically. Meanwhile significant growth in real GDP per capita and therefore real government receipts per capita.
The change isn't that the government is collecting less money. They get more than ever. But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better.
Hence the propensity to sink growing amounts of GDP into paying an ever-heightening stack of middlemen to provide medical care at market prices... instead of simplifying the stack and saving money.
The US government created a mandate, then allowed it to metastasize as health care became more technical and expensive, and is now in the business of sticking its fingers in its ears and pretending there’s not a financial problem.
> The change isn't that the government is collecting less money.
The government is collecting less spending relative to taxes. A deficit is a difference between the two. Logically addressing either side would improve the deficit. However the ruling class prefers hoarding wealth, financing wars, and cutting social programs.
Whether you measure it as nominal dollars, real dollars or real dollars per capita, the US government's tax revenue has only increased over time, so the only explanation for why there are huge deficits now and not before is that its spending has increased by even more. Moreover, a major proportion of that spending increase did go to social programs, and the top 50% of incomes pay 97.7% of the federal taxes.
The actual problem is that even a lot of the "social programs" don't ultimately go to the poor. They require specific services that divert the money to contractors or landlords, or go to affluent retirees who don't really need the money. And, of course, the defense budget is entirely out of hand as well -- but why should we extract more from the economy to fund things that ought not to be funded?
I disagree that wealth is a better measure to use here. As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems, but the wealth stats you want to use dont even try to estimate that form of wealth.
In economics terms, wealth is a measure of capacity to save, taxes come from that capacity too, so I use it as a better estimate of how much a particular demographics can contribute to taxes.
I think that's fair in the context of this thread, given the present distribution realities, the bottom 50% can't contribute to tax revenue. Conversely and a bit more subtle, the top 50% ability to save doesn't seem to be impaired by their >97% contribution to revenue.
> As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems
I'm looking at this as a practical matter, I'm far from moralism and moral philosophy so I can't really relate to your argument above.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Basically unchanged for 70+ years, and far lower historically. Meanwhile significant growth in real GDP per capita and therefore real government receipts per capita.
The change isn't that the government is collecting less money. They get more than ever. But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better.