Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.

Yes, but note both suggestions omit doing anything to ultra-wealthy and continue to drive the wedge between the lower and middle classes, each being told the other is why they can't have nice things.

The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not enough to afford expensive accountants and business formations to shield their assets, or at least not enough assets to make that cheaper than just paying taxes. The wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't.

The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.

> wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't

I used to advocate for doubling all tax brackets. A friend ran the numbers: the result is volatility. The middle class has stable earnings in a way the wealthy do not. That doesn’t mean we can’t tax them more. But there is a trade off.

On an individual level maybe but the top two quintiles have made more money year after year regardless: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-...

It's not like the top echelons of earners have a bad year and GDP plummets or anything; I'm not sure what "volatility" means in this context as far as tax revenues but I can't imagine it results in huge variability or uncertainty.

I actually chose "upper-middle class" rather than "ultra-wealthy" because if we take the ultra-wealthy to be the top 1% or 0.1% or smaller, there just aren't enough actual "ultra-wealthy" people to balance any significant budget by taxing them. Whereas the top 10% or 20% are numerous enough that you can collect serious revenue from them, consistently, and there are fewer ways to dodge that kind of tax.

Which, looping around, is precisely why the ultra-wealthy want to prevent anyone getting the idea of taxing the upper-middle class: that's what they mostly disguise themselves as for tax purposes.