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Me too but we can still slash and burn spending.

I am sure a bipartisan group not worried about getting reelected could slash a trillion without blinking. Unfortunately no such group will ever exist.

I wonder what just the federal workforce and welfare and snap and some other out of control programs combined cost us each year.

The difficulty with spending cuts is that the vast majority of federal spending goes to military, social security, and medicare (plus debt service). While I agree that we need to cut everything unnecessary, beginning with obvious targets like the Department of Education, Department of Energy (most of it anyway), PBS, NPR, etc., it’s really difficult to find enough money there to make much of a dent in the deficit.

I think Trump is on the right track in focusing on expanding the economy. Unless we all want severe austerity across the board at some point, we’ve got to grow the pie itself significantly, instead of just fighting over allocation of the slices. And it has to happen on an international scale, not just domestically. We have to become producers and manufacturers again, and we’ve got to find ways to thwart China’s desire to supplant us as the dominant economy.

As for the tax cut question, as the old saying goes, we can’t tax ourselves into prosperity. There is a sweet spot on the Laffer Curve, where overall revenue versus tax rates is optimal. Raise taxes higher than that, and the tax burden becomes too high, creating economic disincentives and causing revenue to decrease. Lower taxes below that point and revenue also decreases simply because below a certain tax rate additional marginal economic expansion is outweighed by failure to capture enough revenue.

We should initially cut taxes further as Trump suggests, in order to do as much as is practical to juice the economy and to make our business environment as competitive and desirable as possible, to pull more activity here from overseas. Then, over time as the economy booms, taxes can be adjusted back toward the optimal point on the Laffer Curve to use that newly-built economic engine to pay off the debt. But you’ve got to have the engine in place first, otherwise we’ll just tax the country literally to death.

If I remember correctly, Art Laffer’s optimal tax rate on his curve is around 15% (I believe this represented the average total individual tax burden, though it may have been federal only, I don’t recall for sure).