Have you thought about it this way?

The $16 trillion figure we hear for the national debt is alarming indeed.  The real picture, though, is far more grim.  That's because the liabilities of Medicare and Social Security aren't included in the government's balance sheet.  Why not?  Maybe because we'd then see that we are actually on the hook for $86.8 trillion.

Whew!  That's a lot of obligation.  How are we gonna climb out from under it?  Well, consider the numbers and see if you can come up with an answer:

When the accrued expenses of the government's entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually. That is the total of the average annual accrued liabilities of just the two largest entitlement programs, plus the annual cash deficit.

Nothing like that $8 trillion amount is available for the IRS to target. According to the most recent tax data, all individuals filing tax returns in America and earning more than $66,193 per year have a total adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2006, when corporate taxable income peaked before the recession, all corporations in the U.S. had total income for tax purposes of $1.6 trillion. That comes to $6.7 trillion available to tax from these individuals and corporations under existing tax laws.

In short, if the government confiscated the entire adjusted gross income of these American taxpayers, plus all of the corporate taxable income in the year before the recession, it wouldn't be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities. Some public officials and pundits claim we can dig our way out through tax increases on upper-income earners, or even all taxpayers. In reality, that would amount to bailing out the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. Only by addressing these unsustainable spending commitments can the nation's debt and deficit problems be solved.

The tax increase that the MEC and Harry Reid are insisting on has nothing to do with addressing this nation's fiscal crisis.  Nothing.