If the tax return said: repay your portion of the debt and you’re off the hook for any future deficit spending or moneys collected to service national debt, I would be tempted to take that offer.

Unless there is default, there’s no reason for the government to not to keep accumulating debt.

The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely.

The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.

Stop lying. No one in the US pays a 50% tax rate. The top marginal tax rate is 37%.

And the problem is tax cuts. Decreasing revenue without decreasing spending leads to a larger deficit. I can help you with the math if you need it. The ballooning (pre-Covid) deficit during the Trump administration can be traced directly to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

It goes higher when you include state taxes, local taxes, sales taxes, SSI taxes, unemployment insurance, SDI, gas taxes, property taxes, etc.

Also, some of the above are paid by both employer and employee, which is an accounting trick to make the taxpayer think he/she is paying less.

Most states have income tax too. CA's is 13%.

Indeed, we haven't had a "budget" in years. Now we have "spending bills" instead.

are you in Ontario?

In the US, you can give extra money to reduce the deficit. You cannot redirect what you already owe so that it all goes towards reducing the deficit.

So I think your point "nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!" is moot.

That sort of direction wouldn't be meaningful anyway, since money is fungible.

It’s not like money that was previously allocated for debt service could then be moved to something else. In AZ we can direct about $4k to specific organizations and receive a 1:1 tax credit. That impacts revenues, but not how much those programs would receive otherwise.

They could obviously just issue new debt, though.

You can make tax-deductible donations to certain organizations. This results in them getting more funding than they otherwise would. Sure, redirections may not modify the budget of the US government programs directly, but it does have meaningful impact on the world.

It would be if federal budgets were determined by the allocations people indicated on their tax filings. But that would be a mess if unrestricted.