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> they are playing this cruel game with other people's money. This meme about taxes needs to die.

true_religion 8y ago
The government represents us in the same way that a hedge fund owner represents its clients. They have a job to do: ensuring the money is well spent, however it isn't their money and they do not make their own rules.
- dgzl 8y ago
  Except taxpayers don't have much choice in this game unfortunately.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    What do you mean? The government is not a single contiguous entity. To have another government, elect different politicians. The frustration is that however much we dislike Tuesday government, these are the representatives that we collectively chose.
- danharaj 8y ago
  That is literally not the case. Not legally, not morally, not in any reasonable sense except in a certain vein of political rhetoric which has no basis in reality. The government has no fiduciary duty to you or any other citizen or any tax payer.
chongli 8y ago
Just because I'm critical of how the government allocates its spending doesn't mean I'm against taxes. Be careful about what you assume of people.
- danharaj 8y ago
  That's not what I'm talking about. The government doesn't spend other peoples' money. It spends its own money. Tax revenue is money people owe to the government. Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. The meme I'm talking about is "taxpayer's money". It's a bullshit piece of rhetoric that tries to imply that the government has some legal or moral duty to the people who pay taxes. That is expressly not the case. The government's money is not in any sort of fiduciary relationship with anyone else. The fact that you nor anyone else didn't even notice what I was talking about just shows how pervasive this meme is.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    > Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. Maybe in the sense, like in Office Space, that "it becomes ours", but not in any real way. The government is the public entity; its things are everyone's things. The fact that it (with few exceptions) acts like a private entity, with entitlement to its plunder, doesn't change anything about this.
  - MaulingMonkey 8y ago
    Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other people's money", but the entire core of the points made remains. Similar problems of waste can happen with large corporations. (The smaller the company, the more likely such waste will actually impact your own paycheck, and the more market forces will make such waste painful.) "Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera. We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well. Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...
dexterdog 8y ago
How is it a meme? The govt gets to play with essentially unlimited funds. Is it a wonder that they rarely spend it efficiently? Is it also a wonder that they never actually lower overall taxes?
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  The recent large uptick of the federal deficit would seem to disagree with your final question.
- c3534l 8y ago
  The government lowers taxes all the time. The last three presidents for instance.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    The first of the last three Presidents took office in 2001. Federal receipts in 2000 were $2.03T. They are now >$3.3T. (This also exceeds the amount of inflation over the same period.) And the increase in the deficits is the increase in spending on top of that.
    - Shaanie 8y ago
      Given the population increase and inflation, my calculation puts the expected tax at 3.3167T.
    - c3534l 8y ago
      Right, but Bush took office during the tech bust followed by a massive recession caused by 9/11 and a number of corporate scandals. Receipts may have increased, but that's because size of the pie has grown, not because you're taking a larger slice.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        The number of people eligible for Medicare and the level of benefits it pays out are basically entirely independent from how many rolls of adhesive tape 3M sells. If they sell twice as much tape, so that the same percentage of their profits is twice as much money, you don't inherently have to expand Medicare in order to spend all the additional money (and then some). But they did. The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too. And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget? "Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.
village-idiot 8y ago
I’m getting very tired of seeing people here misinterpret others’ words in the least charitable light possible. GP in no way indicated that they were anti-tax, but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is. Literally not the case. I like how you said I misinterpreted the words of the original post but then repeated the very meme I said needs to die. It's fake news. The tax payer owes taxes to the government. The government spends its own money, not someone else's. The shallowest reflection on the matter would reveal this meme to be a sham of pure rhetoric.
jkartchner 8y ago
It's not about taxes at all. The government has no financial limits, particularly where political damage could be done. A defendant, unless exceptionally wealthy, does. Dr. Ibrahim had to put up almost $4 million just to get back to square one. Do you have that kind of money lying around? If not, what would have happened to you in Dr. Ibrahims shoes?

The government represents us in the same way that a hedge fund owner represents its clients. They have a job to do: ensuring the money is well spent, however it isn't their money and they do not make their own rules.

dgzl 8y ago
Except taxpayers don't have much choice in this game unfortunately.
- true_religion 8y ago
  What do you mean? The government is not a single contiguous entity. To have another government, elect different politicians. The frustration is that however much we dislike Tuesday government, these are the representatives that we collectively chose.
danharaj 8y ago
That is literally not the case. Not legally, not morally, not in any reasonable sense except in a certain vein of political rhetoric which has no basis in reality. The government has no fiduciary duty to you or any other citizen or any tax payer.

chongli 8y ago

Just because I'm critical of how the government allocates its spending doesn't mean I'm against taxes. Be careful about what you assume of people.

danharaj 8y ago
That's not what I'm talking about. The government doesn't spend other peoples' money. It spends its own money. Tax revenue is money people owe to the government. Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. The meme I'm talking about is "taxpayer's money". It's a bullshit piece of rhetoric that tries to imply that the government has some legal or moral duty to the people who pay taxes. That is expressly not the case. The government's money is not in any sort of fiduciary relationship with anyone else. The fact that you nor anyone else didn't even notice what I was talking about just shows how pervasive this meme is.
- jMyles 8y ago
  > Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. Maybe in the sense, like in Office Space, that "it becomes ours", but not in any real way. The government is the public entity; its things are everyone's things. The fact that it (with few exceptions) acts like a private entity, with entitlement to its plunder, doesn't change anything about this.
- MaulingMonkey 8y ago
  Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other people's money", but the entire core of the points made remains. Similar problems of waste can happen with large corporations. (The smaller the company, the more likely such waste will actually impact your own paycheck, and the more market forces will make such waste painful.) "Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera. We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well. Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...

dexterdog 8y ago

How is it a meme? The govt gets to play with essentially unlimited funds. Is it a wonder that they rarely spend it efficiently? Is it also a wonder that they never actually lower overall taxes?

SomeHacker44 8y ago
The recent large uptick of the federal deficit would seem to disagree with your final question.
c3534l 8y ago
The government lowers taxes all the time. The last three presidents for instance.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  The first of the last three Presidents took office in 2001. Federal receipts in 2000 were $2.03T. They are now >$3.3T. (This also exceeds the amount of inflation over the same period.) And the increase in the deficits is the increase in spending on top of that.
  - Shaanie 8y ago
    Given the population increase and inflation, my calculation puts the expected tax at 3.3167T.
  - c3534l 8y ago
    Right, but Bush took office during the tech bust followed by a massive recession caused by 9/11 and a number of corporate scandals. Receipts may have increased, but that's because size of the pie has grown, not because you're taking a larger slice.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      The number of people eligible for Medicare and the level of benefits it pays out are basically entirely independent from how many rolls of adhesive tape 3M sells. If they sell twice as much tape, so that the same percentage of their profits is twice as much money, you don't inherently have to expand Medicare in order to spend all the additional money (and then some). But they did. The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too. And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget? "Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.

village-idiot 8y ago

I’m getting very tired of seeing people here misinterpret others’ words in the least charitable light possible. GP in no way indicated that they were anti-tax, but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is.

danharaj 8y ago
> but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is. Literally not the case. I like how you said I misinterpreted the words of the original post but then repeated the very meme I said needs to die. It's fake news. The tax payer owes taxes to the government. The government spends its own money, not someone else's. The shallowest reflection on the matter would reveal this meme to be a sham of pure rhetoric.

jkartchner 8y ago

It's not about taxes at all. The government has no financial limits, particularly where political damage could be done. A defendant, unless exceptionally wealthy, does. Dr. Ibrahim had to put up almost $4 million just to get back to square one. Do you have that kind of money lying around? If not, what would have happened to you in Dr. Ibrahims shoes?