Serious political thought

the holy of holies the wonderful middle class who no longer pay income tax.

the top 10% percent of tax filers pay 70% of all income taxes. better idea if you don't pay income taxes you don't get to vote! that'd be ok wouldn't it?

by the way the top 1% of filers pay 40% of all income taxes.

it's time you people got out of the wagon and help pull it.

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 for the middle class in this country we are being wiped out by rising cost of living and inflation

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Not really.
According to Pew Research Center:

In 1971, about 61% of Americans were middle class.
By 2023, about 51% were.
Over that same period, the upper-income share rose from roughly 11–14% to around 19–21%.
The lower-income share also rose, from roughly 25–27% to around 29–30

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The holy of holies the idiot who thinks the OP is about only taxes and who pays them.

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The United States government funds and supports other countries war efforts. Billions of taxpayer money is going overseas in recent years. Now I do hear the people saying oh well this is supporting American interest. Here is my thought and question for the middle class in this country we are being wiped out by rising cost of living and inflation.

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sounds like he's talking about taxes to me.

what's really changed in this country post 1988 tax cuts is that our tax scheme and economy no longer rewards mediocrity prior to 1988 it did. by the way it still rewards the middle class by allowing them to no longer pay income taxes, something you people never seem to appreciate, you're welcome.

the truth of the matter is before 1988 we taxed a lot of people (the professional,executive and managerial class) artificially into the middle class. anyone worth a schit who was in the middle class prior to 1988 is now in the upper class. that's what's changed.

the fastest growing group of tax returns over the last four years has been filers making over 400k

Sounds great. How do we do it?

True, but you are leaving out the fact that even those payments don’t cover the cost of government. Thus our obscene debt.

And while the military costs a lot, medicare and Medicaid cost more. Not to mention SSI, but that’s a whole different issue.

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Why shouldn’t the middle class banned together and try to take back the power in the legislative branch from those who seek to destroy us?

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Because not nearly enough voters are willing to make the sacrifice needed for that to happen. Allow me to soapbox a bit...

These points build upon one another, so stick with me:

1. The federal government is currently just over $39.25T in debt with an estimated $1.9T in deficits this year alone. For as far as the forecasted future goes into the future, no deficit is expected to be less than $1.5T. The expectation is for deficits to top $2T annually by 2030 and be into the $3T range by a decade-ish.

Inflation is the effect of having too much money in an economy chasing too few goods. The Congress (keep that in mind, spending originates in the House) has borrowed trillions upon trillions of dollars and pushed them out into the economy over decades and not drained them out. Approximately 50%-55% of last year's budget was spent on individual benefit programs (ie: social programs from Social Security and Mediare to TANF, SNAP, etc).

2. Approximately 30%-40% of all US citizens are on some form of federal individual benefit program.

-Medicaid/CHIP ~75M people are on these programs (22%-25% of the population) with ~68M on Medicaid alone
-SNAP (food stamps) - ~42M people on that (~12% of the population)
-Social Security (not just retirement but survivors and disability) - ~73M (~22% of the population)
-Medicare (65+ crowd and the disabled) - ~70M (~21% of the population)
-SSI (Supplemental Security income for disabled/low-income households and the elderly/blind) - ~7.5M
-TANF (welfare checks) - ~2.6M
---this is not an all-encompassing list, just a good chunk to give you an idea of the scope

3. It would have taken a cut of ~25% to all federal spending last year just to balance the budget and that's not even servicing existing debt. To balance the budget while also continuing to pay debt interest would be ~28%.

This isn't just spending on Section 8 housing, but spending on electricity for government buildings, pay for elected officials, funding the VA, gasoline for Air Force jets, etc. Everything would have had to have been cut by 28% just to continue servicing federal debt while not incurring another cent more.

4. Starting with 2009 there have been only 4 years where the dollar amount of GDP has grown more than the deficit amount for that year. By contrast, from 1970-2008 there were only 5 years where the deficit grew by a larger dollar amount than GDP for that year. What this means is that our economy has become so addicted to federal deficit spending that we would have been in a Recession (or likely a Depression) since 2009 if it were not for the constant and excessive deficit spending.

5. No one goes to DC just to serve a single term. Anyone who voted for a spending bill which had the kind of cuts (whether targeted or broad-based) needed to just balance the budget (much less pay it down at all) would guarantee they would never be re-elected for that position nor elected to any other position ever again.

6. IF, by some miracle of God, they were able to cut spending by enough to balance the budget, the resulting drop in money into the system would cause lots of unrest as the benefit programs were cut, which means less money in the economy, which means job cuts to the point where we're looking at a constant 8%+ unemployment for a good while.

Eventually the system would balance out as prices dropped due to lowered demand (fewer people with jobs means less disposable income to buy things with), but we're talking decades of sacrifices from a society which throws a fit over having to eat at home too often.