In 40 years of working with people across various income and wealth levels, I’ve observed that most people with financial struggles think they have an income problem when, in reality, they actually have a spending problem. If you always spend every dollar you earn – regardless of your income – you will never accumulate wealth.

Now, imagine that you always spend $1.40 for every dollar you earn. That is the U.S. federal government. That kind of pattern cannot go on forever. And as economist Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

The only sustainable way to reduce the amount of money we borrow to pay the government’s day-to-day expenses is to cut those expenses. There simply aren’t enough rich people to tax away the deficit.

The federal deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. Let’s come up with a tax plan to balance the budget by taxing ultra-high income individuals.

There are approximately 800,000 taxpayers with adjusted gross income (AGI) of $1 million or greater. These taxpayers reported a total of $2.7 trillion in AGI, on which they paid $721 billion of taxes. To balance the federal budget by increasing taxes on this group would require they pay nearly 100% of their income in taxes. That’s obviously not going to happen.

What if we expand our definition of “rich,” increasing taxes on everyone with $500,000 or more in AGI? To balance the federal budget, their average tax rate would need to increase from 31% to 74%. There are plenty of reasons this will also never happen, including the fact that up to a third of Congress is estimated to report AGI of $500,000 or more.

Or we could balance the federal budget deficit by assessing a 35% rate on every taxpayer reporting $100,000 or more of AGI. This would be almost tripling the 13.6% average rate paid by those reporting $100,000 of annual income.

Fans of a flat tax might be disappointed to know that the flat rate that would alleviate the federal budget deficit is 28 percent, which would double he tax rate for the average taxpayer.

It is both practically and politically impossible to balance the federal budget solely by increasing taxes. Deficit reduction (especially deficit elimination) will undeniably require spending cuts – which will necessarily require cuts to programs provide valuable services – and nobody likes that.

Interestingly, we could have eliminated the federal deficit in the past decade simply by limiting growth in government spending to inflation and population growth. In the past ten years, inflation and population grew 3.5% annually, compared to 6.3% growth in federal government spending and 4.6% annual growth in tax collections.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.