Top Marginal Tax Rate of 88 percent!

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University constructed the diagram below using data from the Congressional Budget Office during the very early stages of the Great Recession and before the Obama presidency. It shows the increase in marginal tax rates required to fund entitlement spending for 2010, 2050 and 2082. The required increase...

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University constructed the diagram below using data from the Congressional Budget Office during the very early stages of the Great Recession and before the Obama presidency. It shows the increase in marginal tax rates required to fund entitlement spending for 2010, 2050 and 2082. The required increase is staggering.

You would have to more than double the current marginal tax rate for the lowest bracket to fund entitlement spending. Those in the higher tax brackets would shoulder an even greater increase. The CBO explains:

“With no economic feedbacks taken into account and under an assumption that raising marginal tax rates was the only mechanism used to balance the budget, tax rates would have to more than double. The tax rate for the lowest tax bracket would have to be increased from 10 percent to 25 percent; the tax rate on incomes in the current 25 percent bracket would have to be increased to 63 percent; and the tax rate of the highest bracket would have to be raised from 35 percent to 88 percent. The top corporate income tax rate would also increase from 35 percent to 88 percent. Such tax rates would significantly reduce economic activity and would create serious problems with tax avoidance and tax evasion. Revenues would probably fall significantly short of the amount needed to finance the growth of spending; therefore, tax rates at such levels would probably not be economically feasible.”

This was more than a year before ObamaCare was put into law.  With the passage of the increase in health care benefits it is likely that the rates would have to be even higher to fund entitlements. As the economist Herbert Stein famously said “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”