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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

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...
acct1771 8y ago
Your perspective means there's a larger problem that needs addressing.

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...

acct1771 8y ago

Your perspective means there's a larger problem that needs addressing.