<i>Epistemic status: wildly overconfident. "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!"</i><p>This is naive on two counts. You can't raise taxes without affecting people's behaviour. If someone's tax burden goes from 35% to 45%, they'll put more effort into avoiding taxes, and you're not going to see the increase that the obvious calculation says you will.<p>But let's ignore that for now. The highest number here is $276 billion. That's a bit less than 10% of the $3 trillion tax receipts collected in 2014. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Major_receipt_categories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#M...</a><p>That's a significant amount, but it's not really earth shattering unless you can use it effectively. And if you can use it effectively, you probably could have used the previous $3t effectively as well.<p>In reality, when you collect an extra $X billion, you don't get to go "oh great, we can spend $Y billion of that on paying for college tuition, $Z billion on a child tax credit, and the rest can reduce the national debt". What actually happens is the same thing that happened to the rest of your money. It goes to the military, it goes to subsidies for entrenched interests, it goes to pork barrels, and a fraction of it goes to actually improving things.<p>What could an extra $276 billion do? Surprisingly little.