Providing numbers for "no income tax" and "stopping the wars"

[harikaried]

When I was passing out flyers at the farmers market today, someone wanted more details about how much money would be needed without a federal income tax and how much would be saved without the wars. I didn't have exact numbers other than re-quoting that the budget from the 90s would work without today's income tax.

GPO shows the budget for 2012:
- $2.627 trillion receipts
-- $1.141 trillion income tax
- $3.729 trillion outlays

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Un...s_and_spending

So that means finding a budget outlay under $1.486 with no income tax. Bill Clinton's budget submitted for 1996 shows that the actual outlays and not estimates $1.461 trillion real outlays in 1994. So that means we would have a balanced budget with 1994's outlays with today's receipts with no income tax -- as opposed to today's $1.1 trillion deficit.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy96/browse.html (Budget -> Summary tables pg 174)

Do people have numbers for stopping the wars? The Department of Defense for 2012 is $707 billion, and one might be able to estimate the wars as a third of that, so almost $250 billion a year (not including savings from closing down other bases and bringing home troops).

Are these accurate short summaries to tell people?

- $1.1 trillion income tax now
- $1.1 trillion budget deficit (not the total debt)
- Quarter trillion removed from outlays from ending wars
- $1.5 trillion outlays from about 15 years ago, i.e., receipts without income tax today

[sailingaway]

Ron says that if we didn't have income tax we would still have the income we had in the late 1990s and the government was not small then. He figures we could make it that small again.

Avaroth explains it, here (the original version had 1.7 million views):



However, the fact is, you have to balance what we have before we can get to cutting, and that will be the first fight.

[Nate-ForLiberty]

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

a visual representation of the actual 2011 budget. Has numbers n' stuff.