You can believe in good uses of tax money and still question whether the government has too much money or routinely mishandles it. Am I missing your point?
The problem with this stuff is that they are manipulating govt to take people's money in order to promote their own vision of what is good at taxpayer expense. I suppose they think their concept of good is better than everyone else's.
There’s certainly a popular belief that government is mismanaged, but I’m not entirely sure it is, or at least is to the extent and in the areas that anti-tax advocates believe.
Of course make government more effective and efficient. Very few would argue against that.
But at some point, there’s just nothing to trim. However if one’s underlying assumption is all public spending is bad, then of course there’s more to cut, it’s just that the argument to justify the cut is disingenuous.
To be honest I think this is strawman argument. I think it is absolutely true that the government will mismanage some of that money. The question is whether that money used with not 100% efficiency is better than a billionaire who may spend that money on anything. I certainly agree there are rich people who donate their money effectively but even then they decide what to spend the money on. So in my opinion some government mismanagement is not the reason to have some redistribution, but rather a reason to ensure that governments are properly accountable etc. And even if that is a government spending it can be still tendered to private companies depending on what's being done.
The other side of the coin is that regardless of who is holding the money the government not being able to spend it could be considered a better allocation just because they are so damn wasteful. Just because the government SHOULD be correct doesn't mean it actually is, and just because a law says money shall be allocated for X doesn't mean any real value is coming out of X, and the work the money is doing by being kept away from the government should also be considered as a loss when paying for X (so more than just the cost of X is spent).
Yes, here's my reasoning: The Government has the ability to hire subject matter experts on a wide range of issues. They come up with plans to spend it and compete with each other about whose plan is the best and try to make compelling arguments to elected or appointed officials to get funding. The inefficiencies come from the inevitable systematic abuses of bureaucracy: nepotism, greed, personal interest, etcetera etcetera. But, they still end up doing something and it's at least been thought through.
Now, we come to my spending. I'll go through several hypothetical situations.
First, no income tax has been taken from me at all: I spend the money on stupid garbage (video games, comic books, movies, camera equipment, etcetera) or squirrel it away in an investment (as I noted, nice to have more, but I'm making investments anyway). The common good is not served, I have more stuff I probably don't need anyway, the world falls into chaos.
Second, I don't get to spend my taxed money on myself, but have to spend it towards the common good as I so choose: I put it towards a pet project that I think is worthwhile. In my case, it would be to sponsor free programming education for kids. I always thought the computer classes in school were lame and I'd like to see kids get a better introduction at a young age. Scale this up by 300 million people: Nice sounding projects to feed the homeless and provide specialized education to kids and plant gardens etcetera are supremely well funded, but there's no public police department, no public fire department, no public roads, public transportation, center for disease control, EPA, FDA, and all the other acronyms that ensure that you don't get fucking raped by some business that has enough money to buyout the private landowners to do whatever the fuck it wants to do.
Finally, I'm tasked with spending the money in such a way as to form the most ideal society as possible: Shit, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, can't someone else take care of this? Thus, the government.
So, no, I would definitely be more incompetent than the government when it comes to using money for the common good. I would be terrible.
Also, don't go telling me that the private sector would be better at it, because brother, I've worked in a private organization that's as large as a small government, and they are filled to the fucking BRIM with bullshit.
Personally, I've always been of the mind that we should be working on automated systems to handle this sort of thing. Cold, unfeeling automata dedicated towards the most efficient dispersal of public funds. Unmotivated by emotional pleas and the suffering of the individual. Steely, ruthless, determined.
But no one else seems to like that idea and I don't know how to build it.
Many people want something to change but don't trust the government. They have a point. The govt collects more taxes and then just spends more and is right back to needing more $. Often the money doesn't go to where it's needed because lots of palms need to be greased.
The fact that the government is not competent to spend taxpayers' money wisely seems like a good reason to be anti-government. After hearing enough anecdotal evidence on this topic (which very few people have both the capability and desire to thoroughly investigate in order to properly quantify it, thus the reliance on anecdotal evidence), it starts to appear as if such incompetence is an integral feature of all governments once they reach a certain size.
That's a non-sequitur. I said the government is bad at allocating and using funds. Do you disagree with that statement? How does poorly spending trillions get fixed by spending a few more billion?
That's the problem. Solve that first, then move on to taxes.
Like the rest of the US government, just because good things occasionally come from the largest financial expenditures on the planet doesn't mean that the balance of those expenditures are a good idea or that the taking of money for those expenditures is morally justifiable.
any government budget is just too big to get any feeling for this imho. And you can either always argue that its just spend on the wrong things, like military, espionage, social security or that others are not paying enough, like Apple only paying very little taxes because they hoard their money abroad.
I don't understand how we continually believe the governments know how to spend money better, HN is littered with examples of government projects that have been woefully inefficient with the money they've taken.
Yes, clearly the return on services and government investment is quite poor in the U.S. It's a situation in which people reasonably believe that paying more in taxes is throwing money at the problem. This is especially so when one of the major parties actively seeks to prove that government is incompetent.
This assumes government spending is responsible and just. Taking someone's money to line the pockets of bureaucrats and paying inflated prices to government contractors isn't going to make me happy. There is too much corruption. If I felt tax money was being spent well, I might feel differently. Until the government can show they can be trusted with money, I don't see why they should be trusted with any more of it.
I'm not going to apply any morality to an individual spending money they earned. I am going to apply it to a government taking money through taxes. The government has a responsibility to do right by the citizens paying the taxes.
From what I've seen, most of the "tax the rich" people are assuming the government is going to spend the money to help the poor, or support whatever other causes they want... or more transparently, the money taken from the rich will go to them in some way. The reality is that probably won't happen. Even when the government does give out cash, like we saw during the pandemic in the US, look at what happened. A significant percentage of people ran out and bought stuff, costing more than what they were given. A concerning number took on significant debt (like a new car), as if those checks would keep coming. So the money went right back to people who own the companies, raising their wealth by billions, and the people ended up in worse debt than before the wealth was distributed. We see a similar pattern with lotto winners. It doesn't work. A government functioning like Robin Hood isn't the solution, we need education on saving vs spending, living within one's means, and being content with what one has. But these things are all bad for the economy, so there is little incentive for those in power to do it, so it falls on individuals.
The efficient use of money by the government is an important, but separate point. I am in support in improving the way the government uses every cent of our taxes.
The thing about someone else robbing my money is that companies that hide money due in taxes are effectively taking what is not theirs by law, and hiding in a foreign country where we'll never see it. If the government is misusing the money, at least some of it may be recovered, and even the most inefficient use is made inside our country, thus contributing to the local economy.
I think his point is that instead of giving the government less money you should work on making sure that the government actually does the right thing with the money it gets.
This is laughable, an ideological trope with little bearing on reality. Governments spend and also waste far more money than is not only hidden from tax obligations but also more money than is also collected through tax receipts of all kinds (all that sweet, sweet deficit spending at work). And they do indeed waste vast amounts of it, on military plans, boondoggles that go nowhere, bullshit drug wars, bloated bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves to never solve the problems behind their original purpose and so forth, but the blame for no Jetsons future is really with people hiding a fraction outside what's already taxed and keeping it from more of that same public spending waste?
If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...
Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).
The big problem is that the people in government who spend the money don't actually have to earn it, which means that they don't value it. It's the same way with Trust Fund babies, who suckle off their parents' wealth and spend it all on drugs and partying. Since they didn't have to earn the money, it's meaningless to them.
What happens in government is that the ones who spend it have all this power, they don't value the money, so then it goes to people that give them kickbacks, and then there is no accountability. Except in the government you talk about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars as opposed to millions and tens of millions around here.
The government needs to take up a different way of budgeting their money. Instead of cutting budgets where people can save money, they should be increasing budgets of those people that can save money or spend it wisely. There are so many things wrong with how the government spends money, no wonder people hate paying their taxes, when they see $300M spent on the government website that could have been made in SV for less than 1% of that.
While I do agree that having money put to use is preferable to not, the argument that any spending is therefore good seems somewhat absurdist. We wouldn’t apply that logic to government spending, for example - the government gold-plating Air Force One produces different effects than the government building water sanitation, even though they both result in economic activity. Accordingly, some spending produces more social good than others. The argument that critics of spending like this isn’t that it would be better for the money to sit in financial instruments, it’s that the money would be better off partially captured via taxes and more directly allocated to social good.
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