Where are people opposed to taxes being used to fund fire departments, and why?

Why don't we see public transportation as one of your "public goods"?

Is it possible those people who you say are so concerned about value are maybe not seeing how they gain from having public transportation for their community, or are they more concerned about someone else deriving more value from a service than they would?

Why do we pay taxes? We pay taxes so that government can be funded, and in exchange government provides certain public services. Services like firefighters, police, hospitals, etc. If you think about it, these are services that everybody should receive equally, thus they should be services that everyone pays for equally. Currently we have a system where the rich pay a disproportionate amount of the costs for these services, and intentional or otherwise, what has happened is that the rich gain a disproportionately better use of these services, like the police are more likely to protect the rich than the poor, etc.

Bigger houses are more expensive to protect from fires than smaller houses, so real estate taxes should be proportional to the value of the property. Sales tax applies to everyone equally but those who consume more pay for more, which makes sense since those who consume more are making more use out of consumer protection agencies, like the FDA. Bigger companies are more expensive to regulate, so proportional corporate taxes make sense too.

But a human life is a human life. When one person pays more taxes than another person, the implication is that person deserves a larger share of the same essential services we are paying for than those who paid less. That seems a perversion of justice to me.

They pay more because, if we taxed everyone at the same rate, we wouldn't have anywhere near enough money we needed to maintain even the somewhat shoddy state of civilization in the country.

You may not like the idea that the government has to pay for all of the things it does, and that's a fair response, but it doesn't really address the bigger picture: what kind of quality of life do we want in this country?

Just to play into the "low taxes for all" thought experiment, say we slash taxes across the board and have to cut a ton of stuff from our budget. Well, I can think of what I'd cut, and I'm sure you can do the same, and I'd bet there's some overlap, and some contention. But how would these cuts make life harder for your average American (who, mind you, is poor and sick and works their ass off week after week for very little wages)? If we don't care about them--if we throw them to the wolves of fate--is this the kind of country we want to live in, one we will take pride in? How would history view us, at the dawn of the 21st century?

And, to be wise students of history, and reflect on how we got here, rather than assume our forebears were idiots who didn't know what they were doing, why do we have the regulations on business that we do? Why do we have food safety? Why do we have regulations on overtime pay? (And whose bright idea was it to exempt IT workers from that?) Why do we have regulations on medicine, or laws that dictate how and where we drive our cars?

I'm not trying to ask a bunch of leading questions. I don't have the answers here. I just think it's useful to think more broadly than "a flat tax is a fair tax is a just tax is the right thing to do", both historically and ethically.

enjoy,

But the issue has been that municipal taxes are a zero-sum game. People expect taxes to stay at a constant level unless they are getting additional services. So allocating more taxes in one place pulls taxes from another.

By not funding retirement immediately, you can keep taxes constant and not diminish current services.

But most importantly, the single-most-explanative reason why we services have gotten more expensive is because of this ignored tsunami of additional costs caused by the proliferation of the automobile.

The argument is often that either ways should be found to deliver better services for lower cost, or that money should be diverted away from something else instead of a tax raise. Or people want a tax increase for somebody else but not themselves to cover it.

I think this is probably the core of most of these disagreements. If you approach taxation with the assumption that it's mostly just money going to waste, then yeah, you're not going to be very supportive of taxation, especially high tax rates for high income, high net-worth people.

But even if you come at it from that point of view, it has to be acknowledged that there are certain kinds of services which are almost impossible to deliver other than via the government. The private sector will not give you healthcare for all, or any meaningful mass transit (much less HSR), or properly maintained roads and bridges, or a military, or any of a thousand other things that your multiple levels of government spend money on. Yes there is some waste due to corruption or bad decisions, but for most people that is an accepted cost to getting the services that can't be had any other way.

There are a lot of irrational beliefs that come at least in large part from the Republican party; they tell people there is endless waste in the govt and they shouldn't have to pay anything - and rich people should pay always less than they pay now and someday you might be rich so isn't it a good idea to have them pay less taxes.

I'm fortunate to be a well off software engineer, and the state needs to tax people like me more. I would willing pay lots more in taxes if they could build out the freaking light rail quickly, and get gig ethernet to my house (the last thing is less important :-)).

What you don't seem to understand is that I am not arguing against taxes themselves. Or even high taxes. Of course I would pay lots of money to partake in civilized society and its services.

What I want is free market competition for how my taxes are spent and those services received. Because with the current monopoly the government has no reason to improve in any way and instead it takes my taxes and uses them as they see fit - mostly to ensure their reelection.

It takes tremendous amounts of money and gives me horrid services. And they have the gall to tell me that this is the only way and I don't need or deserve any other choice! That, in my book, is stealing.

Imagine please that there was a smartphone tax. You'd pay a certain amount a year and you'd get a single, government issued smartphone. Compare that with the current free-market solution. Which one is better, which one would you prefer?

Now apply that thinking to all other government services. That is my whole point.

The low vs high tax debate is kind of a moot argument anyways since the US govt can pretty much print money as needed...which ends up being an indirect tax on the general public via inflation.

Roads, police, fire fighters, border security, armed forces, environment regulators, etc. I'm certainly open to debating what does and does not fall into this category for fair and acceptable taxation.

But to argue that 'we are taxing your wealth because you have too much' obviously falls outside of that category.

The political left has been pretty clear that the aim isn’t solely a focus on essential (and shared) resources, but on increasing the social safety net (either through UBI, single payer, or other mechanisms).

Separate conversation if those are good policies or not, but the argument isn’t that the rich don’t want to pay for police. That’s an incredible straw man.

Taxation, as I see it though, is more than that. Sure, you're paying for the fire department, but you're also paying for "civilization", for lack of a better word. You're paying for things like the food stamp program, which (if this question applies to you) you would be nowhere near. It's accepting that in order to have a somewhat decent society for all involved, we need more money than would come if everyone was charged at the same rate, and as such, you charge more to the people who can afford it.

1) You're proposing a flat dollar amount be paid as tax by every citizen. This will be most painfully felt by the poorest. What sort of society do you think this leads to?

2) The rich do employ a lot of people, whose education and safety were provided for by taxes. Then there's all those road and water networks they use to deliver goods to the markets they own, and the large amount of property and contracts they have that are enforced by the state. So yes, I do believe they use more government services than the average person.

3) Plenty of markets work that way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination Furthermore, in a market, the seller sets the price, and the buyer is free to take his business elsewhere. And there's plenty of countries to choose from - so why should government services be different?

I don't have a solution for a better system, but I can absolutely see why people do not like taxes. They aren't building the world I want to see.