Banish "fair share" from your vocabulary when speaking of taxation. That is a guaranteed way to derail a productive conversation, by shifting it into arguing a

Banish "fair share" from your vocabulary when speaking of taxation. That is a guaranteed way to derail a productive conversation, by shifting it into arguing about what is fair, rather than what would solve the problem. If we are intent on fairness, the generations that incurred the debts should be the ones forced to pay them off. So for the sake of argument, let's divide the populace by birth year, and institute a tax called the Debt Retirement Tax (DRT). I took the historic debt from 1791, and divided it into 40 buckets. For each subsequent year, I charged each bucket 2% over inflation, dumped each bucket into the bucket to its left (except the leftmost), and divided the increase in debt, after interest, evenly across all 40 buckets. In years when the debt shrank, the reduction was divided evenly across all buckets with a debt balance. This was to simulate the relative contributions to paying off and incurring more debt for working persons for each age 25-64, and all people 65 years or older. I presumed that age brackets younger than 24 have too little political power to significantly affect national debt. Scrolling down to 2018, the age 65+ bucket is now responsible for over 59% of the extant debt. Looking at the numbers over the years, and the clusters of zeroes in particular, whenever the debt is reduced, it is always the younger workers paying off the older people's debts. The eldest have never paid off their share of debt. At the 1835 minimum, the algorithm I used puts 100% of the responsibility for that last bit of debt on the age 65+ bucket. But instead of paying it off, they used their political power to charge up more debt, based on the willingness of the younger folks to work harder pay it off. For the DRT, you could pay an income tax based on how much debt is in your age cohort's bucket, and if your year's bucket gets emptied, then you don't pay DRT the next year unless the debt goes up, and the interest charged on the other buckets doesn't cover your cohort's 1/40th share of it. The DRT can also include an inheritance tax component, so if you die with more debt in your age bucket, the state takes more out of your estate. What is happening now is like identity theft. Elders are running up credit debt for their own benefit when their grandchildren's names are the ones on the accounts. What could possibly be "fair", when that situation is never addressed?