4 ms·

> If we were getting what we're getting now and paying half the taxes then everything would be fine This is the statement I disagree with. Me having a few tho

> If we were getting what we're getting now and paying half the taxes then everything would be fine This is the statement I disagree with. Me having a few thousand extra $ at the end of the year does not give the homeless homes, does not allow me to comparison shop for healthcare, does not tell me if the drug at the store is actually real, does not ensure the schools are safe and effective. And I can't buy those by myself for that extra cash. This is how the people under discussion in this article are feeling. We won't resolve libertarian principles and divides here, but WITHIN THE SCOPE OF THIS ARTICLE, my argument is that the dissatisfied people would not be content if the tax rate is zero, because they aren't dissatisfied about the tax rate. That there is a separate group of people that ARE dissatisfied about the tax rate can be true without being relevant to the first group.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> And I can't buy those by myself for that extra cash. Why not? If you had thousands of dollars a year in extra cash, you could donate to homeless shelters, pay the higher healthcare premiums, subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies, pay for good private schools or donate to scholarship funds, etc. More to the point, you wouldn't need to pay for them to the extent that they already exist. There currently are homeless shelters and multiple health insurance companies and an FDA and mostly reasonable public schools. But they cost twice as much as they ought to or more. The healthcare market in the US is completely broken, but it's completely broken by inefficient regulations. Some of the costs of the inefficiency are paid in private health insurance premiums rather than tax dollars, but the problem is still the inefficiency.
- baumandm 8y ago
  I believe inefficiency is a red herring. I want the government to collect taxes to fund these efforts for two reasons: 1) So that we can have consistent, reliable, and widely-available services. 2) So the financial cost of society is spread fairly across everyone. These are not guarantees the free market provides, because the market doesn't care about outcomes. Giving people tax breaks and hoping they donate it to homeless shelters will probably not help all the homeless people in the country. Switching the FDA to an opt-in subscription service will not prevent unsafe drugs from reaching consumers. Sure I'd prefer government to run be as efficient as possible, but the goal isn't efficiency, it's better outcomes.
- ergothus 8y ago
  > Why not? Drifting off-topic, but the short version is that "subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies" (meaning everything on the shelf at the pharmacy), validating schools, etc all comes down to recreating work that the govt does and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value. I suppose I should get a few degrees to make sure I know how to evaluate these different areas. Hopefully I know which schools will teach me for real and not deliver empty bombastic lies. There's a reason that everywhere that does a good job at these (IMHO) have plenty of taxes. Ultimately it's a war between where you want efficiency (private market) and reliability (govt). All of which is mostly unrelated to the point I made above: The people under discussion are upset about results, not taxation. Even if you are 100% correct that giving them their tax money will allow them to fix the issues they are upset about, that's not the same as actually fixing them. And I, for one, pay taxes so that people with the right knowledge, authority, and economies of scale CAN fix those things. Giving me a tax refund is no different than refunding me for a product not delivered - it's better than losing the money, but I wanted the product.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > "subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies" (meaning everything on the shelf at the pharmacy), validating schools, etc all comes down to recreating work that the govt does That's kind of the point. If the government is doing a crappy job and you can get your money back, go take it to someone else who can do a better job. Maybe even your state or local government instead of the feds. > and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value. This is the exact problem we already have with the government. It isn't inefficient because nobody wants it that way, it's because of regulatory capture and corruption. The only way out of that is for the real party in interest (i.e. the citizens) to be paying attention. But that doesn't work at the scale of the federal government, because a billion dollars in graft is a rounding error but it's still a billion dollars, so you get a billion dollars of incentive for corruption and the taxpayers only care about that specific thing as much as they care about 0.03% of their tax dollars. But the same is true for every other individual program, so corruption and waste is rampant. The problem is that we keep comparing the US government to the governments of other countries when it's the individual US states that are at the scale of most other countries. The national healthcare systems in Europe aren't administered by the EU. They don't have a single military or school system. If they did they would have all the problems we have by trying to do it here -- that much centralization is too big a target for corruption and too easy to hide inefficiency in the complexity and scale. There is a point at which more scale no longer yields more efficiency and instead yields bureaucracy and inefficiency.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> And I can't buy those by myself for that extra cash. Why not? If you had thousands of dollars a year in extra cash, you could donate to homeless shelters, pay the higher healthcare premiums, subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies, pay for good private schools or donate to scholarship funds, etc. More to the point, you wouldn't need to pay for them to the extent that they already exist. There currently are homeless shelters and multiple health insurance companies and an FDA and mostly reasonable public schools. But they cost twice as much as they ought to or more. The healthcare market in the US is completely broken, but it's completely broken by inefficient regulations. Some of the costs of the inefficiency are paid in private health insurance premiums rather than tax dollars, but the problem is still the inefficiency.

baumandm 8y ago
I believe inefficiency is a red herring. I want the government to collect taxes to fund these efforts for two reasons: 1) So that we can have consistent, reliable, and widely-available services. 2) So the financial cost of society is spread fairly across everyone. These are not guarantees the free market provides, because the market doesn't care about outcomes. Giving people tax breaks and hoping they donate it to homeless shelters will probably not help all the homeless people in the country. Switching the FDA to an opt-in subscription service will not prevent unsafe drugs from reaching consumers. Sure I'd prefer government to run be as efficient as possible, but the goal isn't efficiency, it's better outcomes.
ergothus 8y ago
> Why not? Drifting off-topic, but the short version is that "subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies" (meaning everything on the shelf at the pharmacy), validating schools, etc all comes down to recreating work that the govt does and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value. I suppose I should get a few degrees to make sure I know how to evaluate these different areas. Hopefully I know which schools will teach me for real and not deliver empty bombastic lies. There's a reason that everywhere that does a good job at these (IMHO) have plenty of taxes. Ultimately it's a war between where you want efficiency (private market) and reliability (govt). All of which is mostly unrelated to the point I made above: The people under discussion are upset about results, not taxation. Even if you are 100% correct that giving them their tax money will allow them to fix the issues they are upset about, that's not the same as actually fixing them. And I, for one, pay taxes so that people with the right knowledge, authority, and economies of scale CAN fix those things. Giving me a tax refund is no different than refunding me for a product not delivered - it's better than losing the money, but I wanted the product.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > "subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies" (meaning everything on the shelf at the pharmacy), validating schools, etc all comes down to recreating work that the govt does That's kind of the point. If the government is doing a crappy job and you can get your money back, go take it to someone else who can do a better job. Maybe even your state or local government instead of the feds. > and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value. This is the exact problem we already have with the government. It isn't inefficient because nobody wants it that way, it's because of regulatory capture and corruption. The only way out of that is for the real party in interest (i.e. the citizens) to be paying attention. But that doesn't work at the scale of the federal government, because a billion dollars in graft is a rounding error but it's still a billion dollars, so you get a billion dollars of incentive for corruption and the taxpayers only care about that specific thing as much as they care about 0.03% of their tax dollars. But the same is true for every other individual program, so corruption and waste is rampant. The problem is that we keep comparing the US government to the governments of other countries when it's the individual US states that are at the scale of most other countries. The national healthcare systems in Europe aren't administered by the EU. They don't have a single military or school system. If they did they would have all the problems we have by trying to do it here -- that much centralization is too big a target for corruption and too easy to hide inefficiency in the complexity and scale. There is a point at which more scale no longer yields more efficiency and instead yields bureaucracy and inefficiency.