Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Kindly bother someone else.  I have neither the time nor effort to give a shit.

I foresee a time when folks can enter a kind of pod with virtual reality in it, full effects, and basically stay there for most of their lives.  

I have a sibling who moved to Austria in 2008. He's never coming back. He doesn't notice a significant difference in his tax rate from when he lived in the U.S. (Oregon and Washington, mostly). He does notice he has much better health care at a much lower cost. He lives in a beautiful place, in a clean city, with a good job in a nearby city that he commutes to on quality public transit. His step-children had good access to affordable higher education. He gets a lot of vacation every year. Austria isn't perfect, but it's pretty darned nice. It also depends on NATO (read, at least historically: the U.S.) for its national defense. It is also much smaller than the U.S., has a more homogenous population, and largely depends on its neighbors for generating its economy. The country's government has taken a hard-right turn as a result of immigration, largely driven by the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. Austria probably, mostly, has U.S. interventionism in Iraq to thank for that. But maybe not.

He keeps his U.S. citizenship. I'm not sure if he's yet gotten his Austrian citizenship. He can have both, I think, but--at least a decade ago--he was hesitant to call himself anything other than an American.

I have a work colleague who lives most of the year (10+months?) in Barcelona. It was intended to be a one-year thing, but she's been there since 2019. Don't know if she's really coming back, although she keeps her house here, too. Her daughter has been going to school in Barcelona, so it will be a thing to pull her out and bring her back here.

I think I would enjoy living in Europe for a year or so, but I'm an American, and it will always be my home. I think the U.S. is a special place, driven by its political formation, its geography, size, location, and population. But it isn't the only good place to live in the world.

That said, it takes a decent amount of money to move to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Just as it takes some money to move from California to Texas, or Mississippi to New York. For a lot of people, "if you don't love it, leave it" isn't realistic.

Eat the rich!

You'd be stringy and tough - like a longhorn

Nope.

Oops.  Obviously I didn't look into it very closely, or well.  That's weird, to me.

I ASSUMED no state would tax a Roth.

Actually reducing the debt is pretty unlikely. However, we could balance the budget, or get close to it, if we were serious about it. That would take changing the tax code, changing the way we pay for entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), and reducing discretionary spending. We could do all of those things, but neither political party seems to want to. It's easier to buy votes through government spending than it is to win votes with economic theory. And we could balance the budget without a major shock to the economy if we did it through a gradual process that the government committed itself to over a period of years. That, unfortunately, is very unlikely to happen, at least in the short term.

On the taxation side, it's not a huge marginal rate at the top that would likely "fix" things; it's a bunch of smaller, marginal changes. The tax code probably is rather bloated, and does allow property owners to avoid a fair amount of taxation on their wealth. Those things could be fixed, but as with everything else, there's no magic bullet. With entitlements, we could change how the taxation works, removing, or changing the caps on the taxation, and for Medicare and Medicaid, we could probably add additional co-pays (on a means tested basis) that might reduce some of the (legal) waste in the system.

All that said, I think the biggest money sink for us remains poverty. The cost to society of having a significant underclass is very high. Ironically, there's a pretty good body of evidence that shows that being poor is also quite expensive. The societal costs include social spending on what we think of as "welfare," but it also means very expensive school-based programs, crime, medical spending, and a host of other costly ills. That said, the fix isn't obvious, or we would have done it. It is neither cut off all federal (and state) spending and let God sort it out, nor is it give everyone tons of free stuff.

What income gets that much taken out, put of curiosity?

If we are talking Federal only at current rates, for MFJ it is almost exactly the top of the 24% bracket a taxable income of $394,600.  At that taxable income your federal tax would be:

• 10% of the first $23,850 or $2,385
• 12% from $23,851-96,950 which works out to $8,772 for a cumulative total of $11,157
• 22% from $96,951-206,700 which works out to $24,145 cumulatively $35,302
• 24% from $206,701-394,600 which works out to $45,096 cumulatively $80,398.