Assignment 16: Dylan Ruddy

There are two things my parents told me never to talk about in public settings. Money and politics, two of the most hidden subjects is social discussions. When other subjects cause mere ripples in the societal lake, these can cause tidal waves. If not explored with extreme caution, they can turn pleasant conversation into a raging inferno of insults and stereotypes. This was not the first topic I wanted to discuss in front of my peers, that I would be in class with for another year and a half. But how can we discuss and resolve issues in these fields without talking about them. The plain answer is that we can’t. We live in the third largest country in the world, and the ninth wealthiest, yet we have the largest debt and it continues to grow. This suggest that there is something wrong with how our nation's money is being managed. During my allotted time, I will discuss the inequities with our tax code and uncover unnecessary governmental spending and provide possible solutions for the United States to be the best nation that it has the potential to be. I do include one disclaimer, I was raised a republican, and though you may not agree with these views, I urge you to at least keep an open mind to consider the possibility of their creation.

            By a show of hands how many of you have had or have a job that gives you a paycheck with taxes already deducted. Behind me, you see My Check in large print across the middle. That is the 80% of my paycheck that I get in my pocket. Surrounding it are smaller words like Social Security Employee, and Medicare Employee. After doing my research I have found that these words, mean about the same thing. Thank you for your mandatory donation to the government, you will never see this money again even though you earned it. These numbers may seem aggravating and they are, but when compared to the one percenters who pay more taxes than the other bottom 90% of taxpayers (Erb, K) my contribution is nothing. Another frustrating thing about this situation is that all taxpayers under the age of 18 have no say in the representatives who will decide where their tax dollars are spent because they don’t yet have a right to vote. This includes me, and just about everyone in this room.

            How do we fix this problem, level the playing field? In an ideal world, it would be to eliminate taxes altogether. Wouldn’t that be nice? But taxes are a necessary evil, they pay the police, the firefighters, the army, and the institute that keeps us from descending into disorder, the government. Keeping this in mind we need taxes, but we also need fair taxation. This could be achieved by the implementation of a flat tax, like that which I pay, 20% of income. However, there would be two exceptions to this rule and only two. Residents will not be taxed this amount, if it brings the amount of money coming into the household below $15,000, per working adult into the house. This number is one person, working minimum wage, for a year, with two weeks unpaid vacation time. You may have wondered why I specified adult a few seconds ago. That leads me to my second exception. In the U.S., the legal age to be an adult is 18. That is when you can vote, drop out of school without your parent’s permission, and for males, sign up for the military draft. Why did I include this exception? Well because I don’t want to pay taxes. But on a more serious note. There were 5.6 million job openings in December of 2015 (Gillespie, P). Eliminating the tax on dependents, as they are legally deemed, would provide an incentive to get them into the job market place, which will not only fill some of these vacancies but will also give these young employees the valuable job experience and references these jobs can provide, and help them to get better jobs down the road. Now that we have fixed the problems with the taxing systems, lets now move on to how we can improve governmental spending.

With all those tax dollars going to the government from 318 million people in the U.S. how could we be in debit. The debt clock for the United states stands at 19.9 trillion dollars and continues to grow. To put that in perspective, if you stacked dollar bills flat, on top of one another the stack could reach from the earth to the moon, back twice and then to the moon again. The solution to this seems clear, pay it back our debit. However, with a sum this big the interest is huge. That is why 229.15 billion dollars, about six percent of the federal budget in 2015 goes to just paying interest on our loans, meaning that every year our debt only grows (Federal Spending). The only way to counteract this process is to pay back more than just the interest, which means finding unnecessary funds somewhere else in the budget. I propose cuts to both the military as well as the Social Security, Unemployment, and Labor sectors.

Now, this semester in AP US History, we saw the effect of Thomas Jefferson’s cut to military spending that put the US in a tough situation in the War of 1812 against the British. However, we live in a different time now, and we are no longer that newly formed country that we were then. As of 2015 the U.S. dedicated almost 16% of its budget, about $609.3 billion dollars for the military (Federal Spending). This may be a bit excessive. To put that into perspective in the world the next closest country, China, spends $143 billion. Still not convinced, the U.S. has ten Nimitz Class aircraft carriers, the very top of the line, the rest of the world has ten combined. And the last military statistic I will give you, of the 8,400 military helicopters in the world, the U.S. owns 6,400 of them. While I agree with many of you that it is nice to have the biggest and best military in the world, the amount of money flooding into it could be reduced and instead go to repaying our debts. While $609.3 billion dollars for military spending may seem huge, it pales in comparison to the $1.28 trillion that goes to Social Security, Unemployment, and Labor portion of our budget. My cut to this area would be to Social Security. Created during the Great Depression by Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was meant to prevent the elderly retiring, and falling into poverty. However, as times change, so must we. From the time since its establishment, life expectancy has increased, and the amount of time people spend in retirement has grown to about 20 years. So, for every American on social security, we are mailing them a check, every month for an average of 20 years. Now the exact time that Social Security will run out of money varies depending on the source but it ranges anywhere from 15 to 25 years. At that point all the money going into social security will be coming out of Income tax from my paycheck and yours.

The basis of this nation was equality for all, no matter of gender or race. The proposed flat tax expands that equality to all incomes, and provides breaks for those at the bottom so that they may have economic mobility, and get out of poverty. Once we complete this our goal should be to decrease our national debt, by paying more than just interest until our country is in the black and we may start giving loans to nations and collecting their interest. I hope this presentation opened your eyes to a different way of thinking whether you shared these beliefs or not. I will end with the words of Albert Einstein, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”