I see you have a bottomless appetite for taxing more and lots of imagination on how to do so. Do you have any answers on how that taxed money will be spent? How we can ensure that it's not just lining the pockets of the politicians and bureaucrats in charge of disbursing the money? How we measure the successes and failures of any taxpayer-funded program, so that we can be reasonably confident that the money is being put to good use? How all of this would play out over generations, knowing that the less money (and therefore power) the people have and the more money (and therefore power) the politicians have, the more likely it is that we will slip into authoritarianism?
It sounds like you would regard any form of taxation as authoritarian. I'd like to know of a system of taxation that _doesn't_ "[force] one group of people to pay more taxes than another..." for one motivation or another.
Though really, higher or lower taxes are in practice beside the point. Whether it's the government, or the employer, most people will never be financially independent and will always find themselves beholden to whichever hand --government or boss-- feeds them.
I argue that if our ultimate goal was financial independence for each and every citizen as opposed to partisan quips about "job creation" and "taxation" and "regulation" then we wouldn't have any major concerns about those things to begin with. They'd be non-issues; ancillary concerns rather than concepts at the forefront of everyone's minds. Precisely because every player has the capital necessary to make a sufficient stand for themselves.
For some reason though I don't think most would approve of such a citizenry.
As someone who isn't super-rich but is relatively wealthy I already do this.
Taxation in my country is almost entirely focused on redistribution of wealth (mostly to cronies, occasionally to proles) whilst the actually meaningful roles of government (as opposed to anarchy) like law and order, defence, border controls etc are neglected.
There's always some pet project. Lower in the thread someone is going on about subsidising female sanitary products, a complete boondoggle. Not only is it a trivial expense, the average man eats 10-20% more food so you could just net out the costs and just not move the money.
Even having a committee research that sort of thing is a waste, but it's just all over the place.
Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.
All the things I think are worth taxing for constantly seem to be underfunded. We seem to have plenty of money for the things I think are wrong.
If you're the government, you can always spend the money on stuff you want but your constituents don't want, and then tell them you have to raise taxes to pay for the things they want.
Something I struggle with personally is how much money I give the government despite having significant ethical concerns over how my money is being spent.
I know my taxes have contributed to the death and suffering of countless people. I try to remind myself that it also helps some people, but I still struggle to justify my lack of resistance knowing that at least some amount will be used in ways I consider evil.
I think there is some pragmatism needed here though. As individuals we don't really have any incentive to pay taxes if they were optional. I think what's needed is more localised spending and the ability for local communities to withhold tax collectively when concerns are raised about how federal governments might spend it. This would give individuals far more input into how their tax money is spent and the system overall would be far more consensual and prompt people to ask if they're okay with x amount being spent developing nuclear weapons or killing civilians in distant lands. I do find it quite odd that the default assumption is that you're a bad person if you don't pay taxes. I suspect someone who avoids tax then contributes an equivalent amount to charity is almost certainly more ethnical than a tax payer like myself.
Thanks. I would rather have money in the hands of people and companies so that they can do stuff with it. I'm not anti-government, but I believe that people and corporations spend money more effectively for themselves than the government can. We obviously need taxes to fund programs that the free market cannot handle efficiently (healthcare, national parks, national defense, and these are just general categories for rhetorical purposes only).
(I'm not a fiscal conservative, but) Do more taxes pay for more and better civilization? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
The question should usually be about the right level of taxes. The problem is that the feedback cycle is often really long. So we are still coasting off of the large investments and projects of the past like the interstate system, dams and waterways, electric grids, etc.
In the short term, we could ignore them (and mostly have), and lower expenditures, and everyone wins! Until it all starts falling apart (which is starting to happen) and we must make huge and costly investments all at once to fix them.
Charlatans are selling short term snake-oil and leaving out the last bit.
Eventually it would be nice for everyone to realize there is a cost to the level of civilization we enjoy. We do however need to be sure we are getting our tax dollars' worth.
The big question is whether our electoral system/voting population can be convinced to elect realists.
I pay plenty of taxes. The amount of willingness I have to pay more represented as an integer is a very large negative one until capital gains, corporate profits, etc. are taxed at a rate similar to the money I make.
This all assumes that pumping money into the problem will solve it. In my estimation there will be more ~100k middle management positions and boondoggle infrastructure projects in government (which are really just middle class welfare programs depending on how you think about it) and poor people will be just as poor.
Richard Murphy has written a book called The Joy of Tax, where one of the central arguments is that the generally accepted view of tax playing the role of funding government expenditure is incorrect, or at the very least, undesirable.
Instead we ought to view tax as being a tool which acts as a force of contraction in the economy, taking money out of circulation that has been put there as a result of government spending.
Both of these (fiscal) mechanisms - spending and taxing - ideally act as a mechanism to democratise the economy. 'Ideally' in the sense that the mechanisms for choosing and applying such policies are democratic, rather than authoritarian, subject to capture, etc. 'Democratise' in the sense that without this intervention, the 'market' has free reign - with ensuing consequences that influence over it is not in the hands of the many.
Libertarians (especially of the free-market ilk) may see this as a positive, however, I think it is plainly obvious that a market is never free, and has a tendency to concentrate wealth (and thus power). In my opinion, decisions over our collective efforts and available resources ought not to be in the hands of the few, but rather, in the many - via truly democratic mechanisms and institutions.
Some interesting, related vids that discuss boom/bust, QE and the like:
I would certainly prefer a government that doesn't spend money on horrific things at all. It'd be great if I could pay my taxes without feeling dirty. I'm hopeful that maybe, with a lot of hard work and creativity, we'll manage to fix our democracy.
But in the meantime, I don't think there's anything morally wrong about legally reducing taxes and sending the money to charity instead. I'd even argue that, since privilege is an issue, we should expand this opportunity beyond the privileged few.
Not a libertarian exactly, I'm even in favor of social welfare programs etc, but against the gradual enlargement of taxation beyond all control. Even under the worst rulers, for most of history, it has usually been at 10% of income.
Used wisely (and without a huge bureaucracy that finds busy work - including military such, and corrupt healthcare pricing) it should be enough to fund basic government, schools, and so on.
For roads, there are tolls and vehicle fees and so on. For pensions and healthcare, we have a special percentage held directly from the salary (at least in my parts). For electricity and telecommunication we pay bills (and still give huge subsidies). There are also municipal taxes for city level stuff.
An alternative would be a country full of people so similar to you that the average person would feel like their countrymen might as well be them. If the entire US was 100% aligned with your own politics then taxes wouldn't be very burdensome.
If my political faction ran the country like a dictatorship, I wouldn't mind them taking my money, because they'd spend it on getting me what I want (which may include "a better world," prioritized according to my subjective view of which world problems are the worst). However because there is more than one political faction in power, the money taken from me will sometimes be spent on things I don't want, including things that I am actually opposed to. Clearly the solution is either cough "greater unity," or the more practical answer which is having minimal taxes to fund only the lowest common denominator of services that everyone wants.
Except you forgot to fast forward to the part where politicians, having even more funds at their disposal to try to gain more power, decide to use that extra money to increase spending even more.
And contrary to the faux Mother Theresa like notion of government that some people like to project, that money will not mostly go towards relatively positive things like feeding hungry children, giving a helping hand to out of work people, or building libraries. This extra cash will mostly go to agencies like the NSA to spy on people more, subsidies to big farming companies, payoffs to the right corrupt dictators, to the FBI to throw more people in cages for consuming a plant, or to corrupt military contractors to build more useless bombs for the next war.
The 16th Amendment (income tax) was only instituted in 1913 and the whole income tax is based on the disgraceful concept that you don't own the fruits of your labor but the government gets it before you do and only allows you whatever cut of it that they can decide on. The US was incredibly prosperous up until that time and was completely functional mostly running on limited tariffs. We would be even more prosperous today without the government sucking up such a large portion of creative wealth that exists in this country.
The IRS should flat out be abolished not just for economic reasons, but also for political reasons. It is unacceptable that they are spying on people even more and that their power can be used to target political enemies.
Hold on: I have to calm my shivering nerves after the intimidating meaningless jargon and threat to evaluate "the science", whether or not you actually have the ability to do so.
I'm contending that you putting words in my mouth is garbage rhetoric and that you should know better.
That higher tax revenue is not an absolute good; primarily because those who impose taxes are incentivized to do so via variously legal and unethical pay that diverts tax funds from their supposed intent back to these people. To the point that the supposed intent should be assumed to be often false until otherwise proven not only by funding but by results.
And that the economic system in general is inherently flawed to the point that there is no solution that will satisfy most people either via trickle-down economics nor via heavy taxation. A slave system is not fixable by free markets, socialism-communism (old school if militant feudalism hidden so that low-wits can get behind it), nor by anything else.
I'm not saying that I have a better solution as far as maintenance of civilization is concerned, but only that the system of money is fundamentally a people-ownership system that inherently cannot offer solutions, either, and out of which no ethical nor practical justification for high taxation is possible. Unless the goal is explicitly to create wealthier feudal lords that do absolutely nothing but to extract taxes to support themselves.
Everyone should pay their taxes.
No one has to accept the lie that more taxation is good taxation.
More money == things are better is just too simple of a model to make a decision like this. You add more money to the system and where does it go? It's not automatically allocated to your causes, some of it gets siphoned off in administrative overhead. Some of it gets reallocated. Some of it is just used for cronyism or lost in the bureaucracy of doing business (e.g. paying lawyer fees to fight NIMBY's who are using environmental review to prevent the development of transportation or public housing).
On a tangential note, there is nothing stopping you and a group of like-minded individuals from just paying more taxes to the government.
While you are correct given the government debt levels and printing of money, on principle taxation should only be used to raise money for public purposes. Not to incentivize or punish behavior.
Allowing the government to use taxation for purposes other than public finance has been and will continue to be an avenue for abuse, and authoritarian control ultimately leading to tyranny
In your story cycle, there is this sort of promotion of learned helplessness of the citizen which can only end in pulling the plug. Perhaps I mistook that focus on the tax aspect instead of the benefit aspect of governing as being generically anti-governement.
In general if you want more efficient use of money, I think it's better payoff to focus on the actual uses and how to get to the benefits more efficiently instead of concentrating on reducing costs. I feel that's true for businesses as well as governments.
Yes, and I agree we need to raise taxes (putting me in a very small minority of libertarians). But as to the question of how much government needs to spend in order to have a functioning society, the clear answer is "much less than it spends today".
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