This would be like eating steak at a lavish restaurant every night (defense spending), and someone else (USFS) eats a spoonful of beans, and then you saying 'we need some belt-tightening'.

We don't, you do. The USFS is already working with a tightened belt.

It's not even that. It's more like eating at a lavish restaurant every night, and paying with pieces of paper that you just printed your picture on. Eventually that game might indeed end, but it has much more to do with other factors than basic arithmetic.

Talk about deficit spending is basically nonsense from the vein of fake austerity politics of the past several decades, whose real purpose was to starve most government functionality while distracting from the many trillions of dollars given out as artificially low interest loans, basically shameless handouts to the financial industry and asset holders (see: the everything bubble).

At best it is incomplete.

Raise taxes back to what they were back in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was over 90%.

Close off the methods rich people use to legally lower their true tax rate. Buffet famously pointed out his tax rate was lower than his secretary's. Bezos back in 2011 when he was worth $18 billion got a $4,000 tax credit because he reported investment losses.

Why are we paying for Bezos' steak?

Fund the IRS to go after rich people, instead of targeting poor people simply because it's cheaper and easier than going after wealthy ones. ("we estimate that each dollar spent on auditing an individual in the 70–80th percentiles produces a return of $9.06. Each dollar spent auditing an individual in the 90–99th percentiles produces a return of $12.48.", https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31376/w313...)

Create a global wealth tax.

Stop paying for all this ridiculously expensive road transportation system and housing sprawl on the backs of our children's future.

And yes, stop eating steak. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Look at Federal tax receipts from the 1950's. Rates change but the amount of tax revenue taken in - as a percent of GDP - doesn't.

Maybe you could change who's paying that money but I doubt it. In any case getting a bigger chunk of GDP into the governments hands seems like a fool's errand to me.

You could try to grow GDP but that's hardly better. Anyone who tells you they know how to make that grow faster is selling something.

Your own words show you understand that the tax burden has shifted away from the richest people.

Don't focus so much on GDP, when the increasing Gini coefficient tells you it's unevenly distributed.

It's especially odd given how single-income families were more common in the 1950s, so a lot of adults had no salary.

If we really wanted to raise the GDP, use tax dollars to fund preschools. Unpaid parents (usually mothers) watching the kids for free isn't included in GDP. Paid teachers are. And those mothers can get a job, raising the GDP even more, all paid by a progressive taxation and wealth tax to help lower Gini.

Eating steak every day is a fool's errand. The metaphor being used to justify austerity is even worse. I was explaining a reason why people might have downvoted that comment. That you have a different opinion is besides the point.

> Anyone who tells you they know how to make that grow faster is selling something

I don't know, ask FDR how he did it (hint: it did not involve less government spending or crippling agencies)

Look at government spending post WWII - it fell through the floor, yet GDP grew like topsey.

Also the government is spending as much as percent of GDP as it did during WWII. You want to increase that?

You never go bankrupt when you can print your own money.

I don't know how old you are, but I predict you will not see a balanced federal budget in your lifetime.