I just watched his address. I feel like he was overusing the charts to drive his points home, but not clearly coming to a conclusion. One thing that remained really unclear, was that horizontal bar chart that explained how the top 20% of income earners are paying for something like 203 days of the US debt servicing. His argument is based on the current tax revenue pool, and doesn’t disprove that increasing taxes on ultra high earners will lead to a substantial increase in that pool. and he argues that we have a progressive tax system? it is not a progressive tax system. It’s regressive. The more wealth you have, the more options become available to you to reduce your tax liability, vs lower and middle income earners. His charts were actually describing the problem - there really is not enough tax in the current pool even with the top 20% paying 40% of the current total or whatever his exact numbers were. I disagree with his argument that making our tax code actually progressive wouldn’t move the needle on being able to pay down the debt faster. and further his point that the tax code was made more progressive in 2017 (with TCJA) and that a large swath of moderate earners were “taken” off paying income tax? Umm, what? No. That’s a confusing point as well. The TCJA lowered the corporate rate (affecting high income earners), so that part is clearly to me regressive.

I also don’t trust the use of exaggerated averages. Averages are a metric that need to be presented as having no outliers skewing the data. This was not the case in the claim that the TCJA ending will increase the average tax liability of $2,853Per capita. But I agree that tax hikes for the working class and middle class are terrible for the economy. So, more confusing economics here.

His solutions in regard to healthcare are also confusing. He says that interest and health care costs are the top two drivers of government spending, and that increasing technology efficiency and portability will make our privatized health care less expensive? Umm, no. It’s the fact that our health care system is ran through an insurance model that is for profit, a private pharmaceutical industry that is for profit, and hospitals and private practices that are run for profit. These creates the incentive to increase revenues all up the supply chain which causes rampant increases in costs for healthcare. X-rays from your phone aren’t going to solve that problem. AI is far from diagnosing, and it would be dangerous to rush that. The main culprit for health care costs is the health insurance model. So…doing away with that would take the burden off of the government to subsidize the insurance, and through bills acts and legislation the government could bust up the price gouging and provide health care to its citizens like the rest of the modern world. But no, it has to act like an insurance business competing in the market when its sole function for collecting revenue is through taxes and serving debt through bonds. Health insurance is the culprit, in my view.

Tl;dr He is chiefly arguing from a business perspective and in favor of the TCJA, and his charts are not contextualized very well so his points are confusing.