There isn't a fixed amount of money. And taxes are only incidentally about public sector hiring.
There is (more or less) a fixed amount of power.
Taxes doesn't raise money, but they do redistribute and decentralise power, making it harder for the very rich to dominate economic and social strategy for their own ends.
It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted.
All very simple when you realise there isn't a fixed amount of money and it grows and shrinks as required by the economy.
What is spent and what is taxed are inductively connected, not directly connected. That's how we have 'deficits'. It's a function of the accounting.
"What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that?"
If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.
The LVT fails to target the areas required, and it lacks a countercyclical behaviour. An employment tax, for example, collects more when the economy is hot and less when it is cooler. That's part of the automatic stabilisation mechanism.
"I'm puzzled as to how you conceive of government not needing land, when many government services do in fact need it"
Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.
Georgism is based upon a view of money that isn't actually the case. So it doesn't work.
I know most of the people here did not take this seriously, but in an ideal world this is how taxes would work (I am no economist so take this with a grain of salt, this is what I think should happen).
"Government needs money to run. They have to develop infrastructures and pay salary of public servants. Also they have to provide welfare to under privileged and subsidies to student communities and such. They cannot just print infinite number of notes so they have to take money from the current cash flow. The cash flow here means things like purchases, salaries, revenue, real estate etc. Now, to do that they have to decide how much to take from whom. They cannot take a fix amount as not every mode of cashflow would be viable with that fix amount. So they decide how much to pull from where. Thus on income we have income tax. But that too is not fixed. You pay depending upon the size of your income and nothing else. Thus ideally, the rich pay more and poor pay less. On the other hand, you have things like sales tax, where the government takes a fixed percentage of all the sales made by a company.
In short the government takes some amount of your money each time you make a transaction... well most of the times. But rest assured, your money comes back to you. The government gives it back in terms of infrastructure or services or carnivals or social security or things like that."
I know this is not perfect, nor is it what happens in the real world. But this is what should happen I think.
Income tax has nothing to do with raising money. It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services. Ideally the tax needs to be incident on the private sector entities that would otherwise hire the people the public sector needs to hire instead - military, judiciary, police, healthcare, education, etc.
Government has no need of private income, therefore it makes no sense to tax it. Expecting the incidence to end up in the correct place requires a faith in fungibility that just isn’t borne out in practice.
When the government uses income taxes to fund public infrastructure like a subway, it improves the land that is incident to that subway which raises the value of that land. The government created a lot of private value that could be taxed to pay for the infrastructure it built. As it stands right now, the government just takes your income with no incentive to actually deliver as it does not benefit directly from its own investments. This allows corruption to creep in as politicians would rather fund massive boondoggles that line up their pockets rather than small incremental improvements that increase government revenue in proportion to how much value it provides.
The government invests in the commons. Access to the commons (proximity to infrastructure) is owned by private individuals who benefit from the investment. The government does not benefit from the investment it made. It's effectively running a charity for a handful of people.
Exactly. The money has to come from somewhere, it's a balancing act. Set taxes too high and you lose the tax base and don't generate enough revenue (5% of 0 is still 0), set too low and you may not generate enough revenue.
Short answer is no. It's one broken measure against other broken measures. Taxes get raised because the budget goes up, but the budget goes up for more stupid reasons (greed and corruption) than good ones, and spending is woefully misallocated.
The wealthy and the government are generally rather intertwined wouldn't you agree? It's not a matter of budget but of sharing a scarce resource, something the wealthy and powerful, (and so by extension the government) are historically not so inclined to do. Taxation is a means of systematising the sharing of resources.
No, I claim increasing prices without increasing wages provoke unrest, and you can see that everywhere in the very present world. Taxes MUST BE a means to redistribute richness to avoid deepening too much the fork between richest and poorest, but for that money MUST BE a public value-less unit of measure of almost any substrate while actual money are private game, substrate of anything, and so taxes are ways to fund states that actually are just slaves of private central banks, that until some politicians decide that enough is enough and instead to play the right way organize a coup to arrest and devastate such privates criminals overnight manu militari publishing a small advise in the early morning: "anyone still fee can confess publicly it's crime against humanity in the next days or face revenge simply knowing a thing: Democracy does bring human rights, and such rights does not serve only to protect poor against riches but to protect any human being against anyone else, without substantial democracy there are no human rights so the old sword way still apply when used, against anyone, mercyless". Not something likely to happen in short times anyway.
About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.
Taxes are practically irrelevant in the US. The gov just goes to the Fed and and increases it's balance.
The real issue is that those in power don't actually want to lift up those that are struggling. I'm not saying there aren't some good politicians--I'm saying politicians don't have the power.
When the government isn't acting on behalf of the people, more taxes would only serve to harm.
I would love a simple tax system but no politician in Washington wants, especially those on the left side of the aisle. the tax system is the largest source of political power that exists in the United States and likely everywhere in the world.
Politicians refuse to let you disarm them. Worse they are adept at convincing you they need more taxing power by playing you off each other, by preying on your jealously or creating it.
What is ignored about investment income taxing is that original income used to create the investment was taxed. Hence we are taxing it more than once and doing so forever. the alternative is they pull their investments/risks and put them into vehicles like bonds that government officials really want them in. don't think these articles come out of thin air, they are politically motivated to get you angry so you willingly give more power to the political class; they are the true one percent
Taxes are more than just a revenue source, they also change people’s bahavor. So, donating money to the government and raising taxes results in different outcomes. I don’t think the US government needs more money, but the current tax structure distorts the economy and creates inefficiency.
Longer term, having the rich pay little taxes destabilizes the nation. Democratic rule is not perticularly stable over time and the US is heading down a very dark path.
In the end their are not enough billionaires where revenue from them really matters. Higher taxes on competent wealthy people has little real impact. However, ultra low capital gains is crital for creating a group of people who are incompetent, inherited lots of money, and stay powerful.
Why do people constantly talk about the Government funding things? The Tax Payer funds government spending, the government simply allocates is, so to spend X 100 million + requires cutting other services or raising taxes, neither of which are popular.
Taxation also causes all sorts of other issues since a large percentage of the population don't pay tax (or much tax), so then there are issues of fairness. Add it to VAT? Income tax? Corporation tax?
There is (more or less) a fixed amount of power.
Taxes doesn't raise money, but they do redistribute and decentralise power, making it harder for the very rich to dominate economic and social strategy for their own ends.
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