By Timothy Loftus, Editor & Publisher | Sergeant Bluff Advocate
(SBA) – The United States national debt is more than $35 trillion—a number so large it almost feels imaginary. Politicians toss it around like a grenade, blaming the other side for lighting the fuse, but few ever say the part out loud that actually matters: The debt isn’t just about overspending. It’s about who is paying into the system, who isn’t, and why the ones with the least are paying the most.
Take Sarah, a single mom living in Siouxland who works full-time at a grocery store and picks up shifts cleaning offices at night. Between federal income taxes, payroll taxes, state taxes, and the sales tax she pays on every gallon of milk and loaf of bread, she’s handing over nearly 28% of her $38,000-a-year income to the government. That’s almost $11,000—money that could be going toward fixing her car, buying new shoes for her kids, or finally getting her own health insurance instead of crossing her fingers every day she doesn’t get sick.
Now compare her to Bill, a hedge fund manager making $25 million a year. Most of Bill’s income is from investments, so it’s taxed at the lower capital gains rate. His team of accountants shuffles profits through shell companies, defers gains, and parks money offshore. His effective tax rate? Around 9%. Bill paid a bigger dollar amount than Sarah, sure—but it’s a tiny fraction of what he takes home. For him, taxes are a mild inconvenience. For her, they are a constant threat to survival.
This is the American tax system in action.
Middle-income Americans—nurses, truck drivers, teachers, retail clerks—pay 12% to 14% in federal income taxes. Add in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, and property taxes, and the total burden often lands between 25%–30% of their income. That’s not a political talking point—it’s a paycheck-to-paycheck reality. And because many of these taxes are regressive, they take a bigger percentage from the people with the least to give.
Meanwhile, the top 1% have built a parallel universe inside the tax code. They live in a world where most income comes from investments taxed at lower rates, where offshore accounts hide billions, and where tax attorneys turn the law into a maze that only the wealthy know how to navigate. Warren Buffett himself once admitted that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
And corporations? Their deal is even sweeter. The official corporate tax rate is 21%, but the real rate for many is between 8% and 10%. In 2020, 55 of America’s largest corporations paid zero in federal income taxes on over $40 billion in profits.
These are companies that rely on our infrastructure, our courts, our educated workforce, and our stable economy—things paid for by taxpayers like Sarah—but they contribute next to nothing to keep the system running.
The result is a massive “tax gap”—the difference between what’s legally owed and what’s actually paid. The IRS says it’s about $600 billion a year. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate that if the top 1% simply paid the same effective tax rate as the bottom 50%, the U.S. could collect another $175–$200 billion annually. Add in corporate loophole closures and better enforcement, and we could easily bring in $500–$800 billion more each year without raising taxes on the middle class or the poor.
At $500 billion a year, that’s $10 trillion off the national debt in 20 years. At $800 billion a year, we could pay off the entire $35 trillion in less than 50 years. And along the way, we’d have the resources to repair roads, expand healthcare, improve schools, and shore up Social Security without cutting a dime from working families.
But that’s not where we are.
Instead, we’re watching people like Mike, a 62-year-old mechanic, calculate whether he can afford to retire at all. His Social Security will cover the basics, but barely—and politicians keep floating ideas about raising the retirement age or cutting benefits “to reduce the debt.” Mike has been paying into the system for 44 years. He’s rebuilt engines in unheated garages in the dead of winter. He’s paid every tax he owes. Yet the “solutions” always seem to come at his expense, while billionaires add another vacation home to their portfolio.
We’ve been here before—just not recently. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the U.S. economy was booming, the top marginal tax rate was over 90%. The wealthiest Americans paid far more, proportionally, than they do today. The current top rate is 37%, and most ultra-rich individuals don’t even hit that number because of how their income is structured.
A fair system would be simple:
• Restore a top marginal rate of 55%–60% on incomes over $5 million.
• Close the capital gains loophole so investment income is taxed like wages.
• Impose a minimum 15% effective corporate tax rate on all profitable companies.
• Add a modest 2%–3% wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million.
• Fully fund the IRS so it can enforce the law against those most likely to avoid taxes—the wealthy and large corporations.
Every one of these measures would raise billions, if not hundreds of billions, without touching the wallets of people like Sarah or Mike.
Opponents say that higher taxes on the wealthy will cause them to take their money elsewhere. But the truth is, the wealthy are not going anywhere. They depend on America’s markets, infrastructure, and legal protections. Countries with higher effective tax rates on the rich still have vibrant economies. And no, raising taxes on billionaires will not kill jobs—if anything, reinvesting in infrastructure, healthcare, and education creates more of them.
The deeper issue is trust. Every time a working family sees a billionaire or a massive corporation pay nothing—or less than they do—it erodes faith in the system. And when people lose faith in the system, democracy itself starts to crack.
Ask Linda, a public school teacher in our area. She spends her own money on classroom supplies because the budget can’t cover basics like paper and pencils. She pays around 27% of her $52,000 salary in combined taxes. Then she reads about a corporation making billions in profit paying zero in federal taxes, and she can’t help but wonder why she should believe the system doesn’t work for her?
Every dollar we pay in interest on the debt is a dollar we can’t use for veterans’ healthcare, rural broadband, maternal care, or climate resilience. That’s not just an economic loss—it’s a moral one.
The United States does not have a debt crisis. We have a priority crisis. We are the richest nation in the history of the world. The problem is not that we can’t afford to fund what we need; it’s that we’ve chosen to protect the ultra-wealthy while squeezing the people who keep the country running.
We could fix it tomorrow. We have the money. We have the tools. What we lack is the political courage to say that if you’ve made more money than you could spend in a hundred lifetimes, you owe something back to the country that gave you the chance to make it.
Because right now, the people mopping hospital floors, driving semi-trucks through blizzards, stocking grocery shelves at 3 a.m., and teaching kids in underfunded schools—they are paying more, proportionally, than billionaires. And that’s not just unfair. That’s wrong.
It’s time to stop pretending we’re broke. It’s time to stop pretending the only answer is cutting benefits or raising taxes on those already drowning. It’s time to build a system that works for everyone—not just those who can afford to buy their own rules.
