And this is why TU Munich, with its whopping 100€ tuition fee (and that 100€ isn’t really for tuition, it’s to pay for a legitimately useful socialized public transit fare thingy) has so many deadbeats and lazy SOBs there. 
Oh wait, no it doesn’t, it’s ranked #1 in Germany and #53 in the world. #21 in engineering. Turns out that college being free does not translate to college degrees being free.
I just assumed he would get Mexico to pay for it.
Perhaps. But it sure as shit wasn’t you who provided the smart comment.
Your calculations are off for a variety of reasons. I’ll just list two
First, you say that the top 1% pay 33.4% in Federal taxes on 2.15T, which would be $718B. That’s incorrect. They may be in a tax bracket that indicates that, but the 1% make their money off investments, not income. Capital gains is taxed at 15%. Executive performance bonuses are considered a business write-off for the company. The list of loopholes goes on.
According to this source, In federal fiscal year 2014 (October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2014), the federal government collected $3.0 trillion in revenues, which were comprised of 46% individual income taxes.
And according to this source, the 1% pay 45.7% of income tax.
So 3 trillion X .46 X .457 = 630 billion dollars. And even that number may be high.
But that’s picking nits, and it’s hard to come up with the exact real number. The real problem with your calculations is this. Say you want to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. We don’t just gather up a trillion dollars and throw it at a bridge. The money isn’t just collected and disappears. And that money isn’t collected solely from the 1%.
How many jobs are created? How much money is then collected in taxes from the jobs that are created? How much money is saved from previously unemployed or underemployed people not using government assistance because they have a job? How much money is saved over the next ten years because we worked to repair a bridge today? How many lives are saved when a bridge doesn’t collapse? How much time is saved because people can get to work rather than take a permanent detour?
Some of these you can calculate. Some of them are educated guesses. All of them either save or earn the government money in the short and long term. But when you’re talking about a government program, you HAVE to calculate these things or else you’re just left with “tax the 1%? We can’t afford that!”
I agree with your overall point.
Just wanted to point out that, if my understanding is correct, long-term capital gains tax is actually 20% for people who are in the top (39.6%) income tax bracket, which probably includes a lot of the capital gains income in the United States.
I have heard of this theory. Is there any evidence?
Well, 100 euros is not free. It also raises 1/3 of it’s funds from profitable enterprises, gets a huge state subsidy and has many outside donations and fund raisers. TUM also has stiff admission requirements, especially for those outside Bavaria.
It might as well be.
That sounds just like any top American university. Except it doesn’t charge students $50K/year so it can pay the administrators and football coaches seven figures.
So, nothing? We are simply expected to take this on faith?
Well, there’s the Laffer curve – but, nobody knows what a Laffer curve really looks like. Of course 0% taxation yields zero revenue and of course 100% taxation yields zero revenue, but everything between those points is a mystery, and the effect on GDP is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Oh, I have seen the Laffer curve many times. It looks like the damp and blurry impression of the base of a martini glass.
It all seems to be based on the assumption that economically, the public sector is some kind of parasitic organism on the private sector, therefore money taken out of the private sector does not contribute to GDP growth. But it does – government does not sock it away under a mattress, government spends it – and usually on things that contribute to GDP growth directly or indirectly.
The premises are false. A government with 0% taxation could still have some revenue from fees. A government with 100% income taxation, presuming it didn’t mail all the revenue overseas, could still have an economy. It might be a highly dysfunctional economy, but I think it wouldn’t actually be zero revenue.
So the premises are untrue in fact, and even if they were true, the rest of it is pure sophistry. There is no empirical evidence that there is a measurable curve.
The underlying premise is that private enterprise handles money with less waste than the government. Sounds quite plausible after you have finished the third martini.