Word: taxed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Second, raise my mother's taxes. My dad paid into Social Security for decades while he was alive, but nowhere near enough, even assuming it had been invested wisely, to throw off the kind of Social Security benefits my mother will receive over her lifetime. (We forget that as recently as 1977 the maximum contribution was only about $1,000 a year. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, it ranged from $45 to $374.) If Social Security were all she had to live on, it would be unthinkable to ask her to take less. But because she has income above...
Third, add an extra penny to the cost of each cigarette by way of an increased federal excise tax (currently eight-tenths of a penny). While it's hard not to sympathize with the addicted smoker, the cost of smoking to society, in medical care and lost productivity, far exceeds the current tax on the product. That is, nonsmokers subsidize smokers. With a tax hike -- this one would raise $5 billion -- they'd merely subsidize them less...
Finally, raise the excise tax on gasoline. A 25 cents-per-gal. hike would raise about $25 billion a year -- but would still price our gasoline at well under half what it costs throughout Europe and Japan. When the U.S. was a net oil exporter and the world's dominant economic force, we could afford to be cavalier about cheap gasoline. But we're now in debt up to our eyeballs, and we're back to severe dependence on imported...
Where possible, you don't tax the things you want to encourage, like investment and work, which is why we should never let the top tax bracket creep back up past 33% (it was 70% as recently as 1981). But you do tax the things you'd like to discourage, like inefficient energy consumption (and its attendant pollution), reliance on imported oil (which threatens national security and worsens the trade deficit) and tobacco (widely recognized as the nation's leading cause of preventable death...
...billion a year we'd raise from these four tax hikes would not be so large as to stifle economic growth, but it might encourage the world financial markets to lower our interest rates. Between the added tax revenue and lower interest on the national debt, the deficit would be cut more than a third. More to the point, there would be the reasonable prospect that the national debt would grow only about half as fast as GNP. So, gradually, over the next decade we'd find ourselves on ever firmer ground...