Federal Debt Equals Roughly $287,859 Per Income-Tax-Paying Household

The Biden administration wants to increase any taxes they can get their grubby hands-on, and CNS News explains why: because they need it. In an analysis, CNS writes about how as Congress “worked in recent days to increase the legal limit on the federal debt, the Treasury kept that debt artificially frozen at approximately $28.9 trillion, where it stood at the beginning of this week.”

With the limit lifted, the federal debt will increase, “then keep steadily climbing, constantly increasing the burden on future taxpayers.” Here’s the analysis:

In 2018, according to the last complete annual report on individual income tax returns published by the Internal Revenue Service, there were 100,424,240 households in the United States that filed what the IRS calls a “taxable return.” “The taxable and nontaxable classification of a return for this report is determined by the presence of ‘total income tax,'” explained the IRS.

“‘Total income tax,'” it said, “was the sum of income tax after credits.”

In other words, the 100,424,240 households that filed a “taxable return” in 2018 actually paid income taxes to the federal government.

If you divide the $28,908,004,857,445 in debt that the federal government owed before the debt limit was liftedby the 100,424,240 American households that paid net income taxes in 2018, it works out to approximately $287,859 per income-tax-paying household.

In order to understand the magnitude of what this means, CNS compares numbers to 1989:

The year that President Ronald Reagan left office, there were 89,178,355 income-tax-paying households in the United States, according to the IRS. At the end of January that year, the federal debt was $2,697,957,000,000.

That means the federal debt then equaled approximately $30,253 per income-tax-paying household.

Even when the January 1989 federal debt of $30,253 per income-tax-paying household is adjusted into November 2021 dollars (using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator), it equals only approximately $69,437.