Would you be willing to pay $76 a month to be a citizen of a solvent country?
I’m serious.
In exchange for that payment, you’d get a country with a government that honored its promises. It would be able to pay the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits vital to the sustenance of millions of Americans.
Cost vs. Benefits
Measured against the security gained, $76 a month isn’t a big deal. In concrete terms, it’s eight six-packs of Budweiser. Or 15 pounds of ground chuck. Or 24 gallons of mid-grade gasoline or diesel for a pickup truck. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, it would be $6 more than the $70.22 cost of an Independence Day picnic.
The question came to mind as I thought about the estimated $4.1 trillion in new debt our nation will add to its growing pile of IOUs now that the “One Big Beautiful Bill” has passed. That is, if we enjoy an entire decade without recession.
How to accomplish this wonderful change?
It could have been easy.
Just let the “One Big Beautiful Bill” die. Let the provisions of the 2027 Tax Cut and Jobs Act that are scheduled to expire do just that.
Expire.
That didn’t happen. The One Big Beautiful Bill passed after the usual threats of excommunication from the president. The wimps fell in line. Or announced their intention not to seek reelection.
The Distribution of Costs
But don’t give up hope. Before I tell you why you shouldn’t give up hope, let me explain that $76 a month price tag for restoring the security so many millions of Americans depend on.
According to a Center for American Progress analysis, the tax cut for middle income households — households in the middle 20 percent of all households – will amount to $910 a year. These are households with incomes between $53,400 and $91,700. Households with less income will get a smaller tax cut. Households with a larger income will get a larger tax cut.
Huge tax cuts will go to the top 1 percent, an estimated $61,090 for incomes starting at $837,800.
Meaningful tax cuts will go to households in the top 5 to top 1 percent, an estimated $12,860 for incomes between $308,900 and $837,800.
For everyone else – the other 95 percent of all households – the tax cuts are small relative to income. More important, they are tiny relative to the certain loss in long-term security due to the inevitable increase in government debt.
It Can Be Undone
In 1988 another horrible bill was passed. It was called the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. The bill created an insurance premium that would cover the rising cost of catastrophic medical costs that would have a huge impact on Social Security benefits for senior citizens. Once they understood what the bill would do to them, seniors started to mobilize and protest the bill. By August 1989 Dan Rostenkowski, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was heckled and booed out of a Town Hall meeting. Seniors followed him out of the meeting. They surrounded his car. They wouldn’t let it move.
You can watch some video of the encounter here.
The bill was repealed by the end of 1989.
More Than Senior Citizens
Senior citizens – people at least 65 years old – now account for 18 percent of our population. That’s certainly a large and growing group. But 95 percent of our population will be badly impacted by the wretched disservice to our country and our people that was just passed.
That’s a lot of people. Loud shouts should do it. It will make the mid-term elections very important.
Is Our Situation Hopeless?
As a journalist, I’ve been a full-time member of the Half-Empty Glass crew. I’ve never felt, however, that we had to sacrifice Americans to make things better. But that’s exactly what the “One Big Beautiful Bill” does. People will be sicker. Americans will live shorter lives because the protections built during and after the Great Depression are being dismantled.
Instead, we can fix our fiscal problems with real actions. The biggest step will be to reform health care, working to reduce its cost as a percentage of GDP. Doing that isn’t a pipedream. It has been done. Virtually all of Europe lives longer than we do — and they do it with less than half of the GDP that we spend.
The same goes for fixing Social Security. As I suggested in a recent column, a national wealth fund for newborns could end the need for the employment tax in less than a century. It would cost no more than the tax revenue raised by the current estate tax, a tax that now exempts estates under $15 million from taxation.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “The Supreme Grand Poohbah Saves Social Security, 5/4/2025: https://scottburns.com/the-supreme-grand-poohbah-saves-social-security/
Scott Burns, “The Fun Way to Make Social Security Solvent 2, 10/1/2023: https://scottburns.com/the-fun-way-to-make-social-security-solvent-2/
Scott Burns, “Choose Money or Life,” 4/22/2023: https://scottburns.com/choosemoney-or-life/
Sources and References:
American Farm Bureau, “Cost of Summer Cookout Nearly Unchanged from 2024,” 6/25/2025:
https://www.fb.org/news-release/cost-of-summer-cookout-nearly-unchanged-from-2024
Peter G. Peterson Foundation: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act Is The Most Expensive Reconciliation Package in Recent History:
https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-is-the-most-expensive-reconciliation-package-in-recent-history/
Jean Ross, “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Failed to Deliver Promised Benefits,” 4/30/2025:
The Tax Policy Center: “How did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act change personal taxes?:
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-did-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-change-personal-taxes
Treasury.gov, “The Cost and Distribution of Extending Expiring Provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,” 1/10/2025:
Jean Ross, “The 2017 Tax Bill’s Pass Through Deduction Largely Favors the Wealthy and Encourages Gaming of the Tax Code: 6/27/2024:
Chuck Marr, Samantha Jacoby, Kris Cox, Gideon Lukens and stephanie Hingtgen, 5/22/2025:
Shameek Rakshit and Matthew McGough, “How does U.S. life expectancy compare to other countries?” 1/31/2025
Jesse Walker, “A Mob of Senior Citizens,” 8/11/2009: https://reason.com/2009/08/11/a-mob-of-senior-citizens/
Peterson-KFF, “How does U.S. life expectancy compare to other countries? https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/#Life%20expectancy%20at%20birth%20in%20years,%201980-2021
Medicare Trustees Report, 2023 pg. 3 https://www.cms.gov/oact/tr/2023#page=7
Tanya Lewis, “The U.S. Just Lost 26 Years’ Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy,” 10/17/2022 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-just-lost-26-years-worth-of-progress-on-life-expectancy/
Max Roser, “Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?” 10/29/2020 https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
Lawrence H. Summers, on Twitter about the Burns-Murdoch article https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1641831721178939392
John Burn-Murdoch, “Why are Americans dying so young?,” 03/30/2023 https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303
David Wallace-Wells, “It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children,” 4/6/2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/deaths-life-expectancy-guns-children.html
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo: Scott Burns, Curious (and hungry) Ducks on Lady Bird Lake, 6/16/2025
(c) Scott Burns, 2025
I would favor a smaller, less powerful,and less costly government. Not enough people agree, and we likely are stuck with something like what we have now. Given that, people should be willing to be taxed sufficiently to fund the government they want. That would mean no BBB, and lots of other unpleasantness, probably higher payroll taxes, and maybe even VAT. I don’t like it, but arithmetic is arithmetic.
Hi Gary,
Our sad reality is that everyone is willing, as you say, “to be taxed sufficiently to fund the government they want” — as long as someone else is paying the taxes. Once actual discussion starts, conversation becomes a series of claimed injustices which, when tallied, tell us that the taxes we pay are too high and the taxes others pay are too low.
As a practical matter, I believe that we can change our tax structure and our institutions so that government can provide what the people need. We could, for instance, eliminate the largest tax most Americans pay — the employment tax — by committing to a national wealth fund for all newborns, as I suggested in a column from the Supreme Grand Poohbah a few months ago. Our larger problem is healthcare which the developed nations of Europe provide for far less of GDP while having longer life expectancies. All we need to do is get over our “not invented here” fetish.
We can do this.
Mr. Burns,
I am a big fan, going back to your days at the Dallas Morning News. I always find your columns thought-provoking and well worth the time.
While not directly addressed in your most recent column, I believe that we should publicly flog the next politician who says, “the rich should pay their fair share of taxes.”
I don’t believe we have a revenue problem; I think we have a spending problem. I agree that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes, but I don’t believe that anyone’s (let alone half of the population ) fair share of federal income taxes is zero. People would approach government spending if everyone had some skin in the game.
Thanks for all of your insights.
Hi Alan,
Taxes are hardly ever discussed in the context of our entire tax system. The result is unending meaningless comment and emoting. When discussing the Federal income tax only, we have a highly graduated system that excuses about half the population from the tax. You’re not alone at finding this annoying. When our entire tax system is considered (Federal income, employment tax, sales tax, excise taxes and state/local taxes research has shown that the tax burden is remarkably high at the lowest levels of income, quite even over a long band of income, and relatively low at the very highest levels of income.
Warren Buffett, for instance, has commented that he pays taxes at a far lower rate than his secretary. As a retiree with income from investments, my tax burden is far lower than the burden carried by my son — or any other self-employed business man and the vast majority of wage workers. This is particularly true when discussing differences in marginal tax rates rather than average tax rates.
This is a problem we can solve. The first requisite is actual thinking from politicians (of both parties!) rather than emotional sound bites that play to social media age grievances.
It’s also a subject worth a column. So, thank you for the homework assignment!
Sorry for the disjointed, interrupted message. I accidentally hit send instead of enter.
It would seem that many people would approach government spending if they had some personal investment in the revenue side of the equation.
Perhaps, I am in the minority in thinking that the people who pay income tax should benefit from tax cuts. I am of the opinion that we have too much income distribution for a healthy society to function efficiently .
Thanks again