Karl Auerbach3d ago

Headline: "Trump seeks $1.5tn for defense department in budget request to Congress"

Headline: "White House Seeks 40 Percent Increase in Military Budget"

Let's run some numbers - Each $billion in Federal expenditure costs taxpayers about $3 per person.

$1.5tn is 1500 $billion - which works out to be $4,500 per tax payer.

So trump is asking for $4,500 from each person, each man, each woman, each child, in the US.

Or for a family of 4, that's $18,000 in taxes to pay for the trump/hegseth wars and war machines.

Corporations, like Amazon, Tesla, Exxon, won't pay a penny - they tend to escape taxes altogether. Same for many $billionaires - for instance none of the Trump family will pay a dime for this.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/03/us/trump-news

White House Seeks 40 Percent Increase in Military Spending

The New York Times
Show threadWesDym3d ago
@karlauerbach Your comment suggests that children pay taxes. They do not. Lots of adults don't, either.
Show threadKarl Auerbach3d ago

@wesdym You have a valid point - the tax burden of this $1.5Trillion expense will fall on taxpayers unequally, as it usually does. Note, however, that many wealthy people and large corporations will pay nothing towards this huge expense.

Moreover, because El Cheato is "balancing" this military expense by cutting things like education support, ACA subsidies, etc this expense will be borne by non-taxpaying children, albeit indirectly.

As is (or was) often said "There Ain't No Thing As A Free Lunch" - TANSTAAFL.

Show threadWesDym

@karlauerbach My point was actually much more basic than that. OP said:

1) "$1.5tn is 1500 $billion - which works out to be $4500 **per tax payer.** [Emphasis mine, and ignoring several writing errors]

2) "So trump is asking for $4500 from each person, each man, each woman, each child, in the US." [Again, ignoring writing errors]

Since the numbers are the same, that means that OP believes that "each person" in the US is a taxpayer. Including "each child".

Apr 3 at 10:39pmWeb
Show threadKarl Auerbach3d ago

@wesdym I did, in a prior post, mention that yes, not everyone pays taxes.

So, rather than defending trump and his trillion and a half dollar per year military, I will concede that you are right but in so doing I will also mention that that simply changes the calculation in a way that *increases* the burden on each tax payer (many of whom have non-tax paying family members - children make up a bit more than 20% of the US population.)

So rather than a "typical" four member family paying $18,000, it may pay a few thousand less and single taxpayers may pay a few thousand more.

To my mind that is a distinction without a difference.

As a net, the cost of trump's mega-military will land almost entirely on middle and lower class tax payers and relatively rarely on large corporations or the extremely wealthy.

And as I mentioned in that other post, there will be an indirect cost on many (whether taxpayers or not) in terms of reduced health care, worse infrastructure, higher education costs, and so on.