Out of curiosity, I ran some BI numbers and arrived at a similar figure ($2.9T/yr, 17% of GDP, 81% of the entire federal budget). I dug into some numbers to tr

Out of curiosity, I ran some BI numbers and arrived at a similar figure ($2.9T/yr, 17% of GDP, 81% of the entire federal budget). I dug into some numbers to try to figure out what kind of tax rate you'd need to make that work. It's... challenging to say the least. What I did find however was that in terms of income distribution, only 23M households were making <$20K/yr (mean household size was 2). An incredibly rough number, but you could run a Guaranteed Minimum Income program for $20K/yr for about 10x less (1.7% GDP) - you'd get that for free if you switched to single-payer nationalized health care (Canada, Germany, France, UK, Japan costs are 9-11% GDP while the US currently spends just under 18% GDP)[1] This of course will never happen in the US because it'd make too much sense. If you want to play w/ some numbers/sources: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgAh7-k-pFfVdG1YOThnbkM0NXJMNFR6MXhLWWJvLXc&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgAh7-k-pFfVdG1... [1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS