If you look at a graph of our national debt over time, the very first spike was in the 1930s when FDR passed the New Deal Acts, a series of bills that saved our economy from the Great Depression and helped tons of Americans get back on their feet.

After that, our national debt remained stagnant as our society experienced the greatest economic boom we’d ever seen. Then in the 1980s, something caused our national debt to balloon and America has seen uncontrolled debt growth ever since.

What happened in the 1980s that ruined the economy so badly?

You see, in 1980, the tax brackets were laid out differently than they are today. For high income earners, everything over $215,400 they earned (which would be $841,584.01 today) was taxed at 70%. Then in 1981-1984, Ronald Reagan passed a series of laws lowering this tax rate down to 28% in just four years, resulting in the government losing $208 billion over those four years, which would be a loss of over $812 billion in today’s money.

Reagan believed these tax cuts would incentivize Americans to work harder and make more money, which would in turn bring in more tax revenue even with lower tax rates, but the project failed. Even worse, high income Americans got used to the new tax rates and most attempts to fix the national debt by replacing the current tax brackets with the ones that worked have been shot down.

As of 2025, the highest individual tax bracket is 37% for any amount someone earns in a year over $751,600, and our government is $38 trillion dollars in debt. This amount of debt is causing other countries to lose faith in the US dollar and causing our inflation to rise, making things more expensive for the average person.

So how can we fix this?

In 2024, Elon Musk earned $203 billion. If we added a new tax bracket that taxed any amount an individual earned in a year over $7 million dollars at 60%, we could be adding almost $122 billion this year to our government from just one single person, assuming we also closed some of the more ridiculous tax exemptions as well.

A change like this will not negatively affect the average person and could enable the US to pay down our debt and strengthen our faith in our government’s ability to continue funding necessary things like the Social Security program. It could even help fund programs that could reduce insurance and healthcare costs.

However, there is a phenomenon called the “prospect of upward mobility” that has clouded our brains in recent times and led the average person to vote against our best interests. We struggle to vote for something like this because we think “what if I become a millionaire?” And so we continue struggling to buy groceries and pay for health insurance because we’d rather gamble on not hurting the future, potential millionaire version of ourselves.

Of course, there’s also another way to pay for the government’s debt without having to raise taxes. We could try to invade another country and take their natural resources to pay for it. Unfortunately, the value of Venezuela’s entire stockpile of oil is only worth $17 trillion, which isn’t even half of our national debt. Estimates for Greenland’s natural resources also vary wildly from $200 billion to just over $1 trillion, so unless we have some insider knowledge, it doesn’t sound to me like a gamble worth losing our European allies over. Maybe there are some other countries that are worth invading.

Or we could just raise the tax rates on the wealthy.

Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.