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How is it unfair for people making twice as much, to pay twice as much? If anything, "fairness" would favor a system where (absolute) taxes went up slower than

How is it unfair for people making twice as much, to pay twice as much? If anything, "fairness" would favor a system where (absolute) taxes went up slower than income, as I doubt consumption of government services increases linearly with income (modulo rent seeking by the very rich and powerful).

zaksoup 8y ago
Taxes are explicitly and intentionally not fair. It's not fair that I pay taxes to public schooling when I could just send my kids to a private school. It's not fair that I pay taxes to the roads when I drive significantly less than average. It's not fair that I pay taxes to subsidize the USPS when I don't ever mail things. Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. We agree that society as a whole benefits from every child having access to a high quality education. We agree that society as a whole benefits from free and easy travel. I read an economic report a while back (still trying to find it) that posited that a significant contributor to the US's current economic success and high rate of entrepreneurial system was the USPS. The ability for everybody to mail anything anywhere on the cheap allowed for an untold number of companies to exist and be competitive. To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  > Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. I agree with this 100%, and thank you for stating it so clearly. > We agree that society as a whole benefits from [...] Well, not all of us agree, but certainly a large majority. > To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor. It also sets up a hell of a strawman for the abolition of taxation in general - if the goal is for the individual to pay based on their consumption, then the most effective means of achieving that with the lowest possible overhead would be to allow a competitive marketplace to develop for those things. For the record, I do support the abolition of all taxation, but find this argument to be very poorly constructed. My justification is that taxation is instituted through the implicit threat of violence. That said, from a practical standpoint, if we're going to have a government funded through taxation, it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible. That means the ruleset should be as simple as possible, and that using taxation powers to modify behavior should be done rarely if ever in order to maintain that simplicity.
  - zaksoup 8y ago
    To be clear, our government is not funded through taxation. If the government is the sole issuer of a currency then the government is also capable of paying for anything and everything priced in that currency, full stop. To put it another way... Question: those dollars you have in your pocket, where'd they come from? Answer: The government issued them and they eventually found their way to me Question: How'd the government have them to issue them? Answer: They taxed it from somebody else. Question: How'd that person get those dollars? Taxation is a method of controlling inflation and the implicit threat of violence isn't directly related or due to taxation, but rather it's connected to the government's monopoly on a fiat currency. Our government is funded through being the monopoly issuer of a currency that it requires all transactions be priced in while enforcing that monopoly with the implicit threat of violence. Our government (and all governments that are monopoly issuers of fiat currency) additionally use taxation as methods of economic control, but not funding. > it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible I'm not sure I agree with this. If the government is going to tax as a method of inflation control it's in our best interest that that taxation does the "least harm" and as a democratic society we have the opportunity to vigorously debate based on evidence and research how we define "least harm". The simplest ruleset possible could easily be "everybody contributes $30k/year" (more or less what my annual tax burden is) but suddenly we're bankrupting a majority of Americans. Perhaps "as possible" includes an implicit "without bankrupting a majority of individuals subject to the tax" but at that point "as possible" is just a doorway to say "taxing should be simple [except when it can't be]" and to me that's the same as saying "taxing is complicated" which is, finally, to say that I think it's really a whole lot of nothing interesting to say "I think tax rules should be simple". Edit: And yes, I understand that State taxes (as opposed to federal taxes) do fund State services (Property Taxes -> Schools in CA, for ex), but the States are not monopoly issuers of a fiat currency... It's complicated and hairy but the reason I bring up the issue of funding via taxes vs. issuing dollars is because almost always in conversations about flat tax rates or "simplifying tax code" it's in reference to federal taxes and not state/local taxes.
    - ric2b 7y ago
      What about the money banks create through fractional reserve lending? That ends up being significantly larger than the currency issued by the government, so the government might actually get more revenue from taxes than from money printing.
jogjayr 8y ago
Taxes aren't just about consumption of government services. If you earn more, you've clearly benefited from living in that society more than someone who does not. Or, as an economist would put it, it's price discrimination - charging more to the customer who gets more value out of the product.
- nybble41 8y ago
  > If you earn more, you've clearly benefited from living in that society more than someone who does not. No, those who consume more have benefited more. Earning more is just the opposite: it shows that you've provided more benefit to society than someone who earns less. The ones who benefit most from society are the ones who manage to consume more than they earn.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    There is little to no correlation of benefit to society provided and salary gained. Nobel prize winning scientists are generally not poverty-stricken, but they rarely make anything close to what a successful Wall Street stockbroker does, for example.
  - jogjayr 8y ago
    > No, those who consume more have benefited more. Usually you can consume more if you have earned more i.e. have more buying power. But I know that's not what you mean. > Earning more is just the opposite: it shows that you've provided more benefit to society than someone who earns less. They're not very strongly correlated. It's possible to provide value without seeing much in reward (janitors, nurses, schoolteachers), earn plenty without providing much or even negative value (telemarketers, those opioid manufacturers we're hearing about), or both provide value and earn $$$ (Google, StackOverflow). In any case the taxman doesn't care about "value" provided to society because it's such a nebulous concept. The IRS doesn't let you take deductions for adding value or add extra taxes because you're a telemarketer. Even if you provided a ton of value to society while getting rich, you still got rich. And your society's enforcement of laws and property rights, educated citizenry, and infrastructure were likely crucial to this. > The ones who benefit most from society are the ones who manage to consume more than they earn. This is true in the case of those who inherit large fortunes/trust funds and don't work. Tax laws favor them greatly at present (lower estate and capital gains taxes). It's not true at the other end of the scale though. If not having a job and being on food stamps/medicaid/unemployment was really all that great, you'd have far more people looking to get in on it. It's actually a miserable situation that most people work their hardest to never fall into.

zaksoup 8y ago

Taxes are explicitly and intentionally not fair. It's not fair that I pay taxes to public schooling when I could just send my kids to a private school. It's not fair that I pay taxes to the roads when I drive significantly less than average. It's not fair that I pay taxes to subsidize the USPS when I don't ever mail things. Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. We agree that society as a whole benefits from every child having access to a high quality education. We agree that society as a whole benefits from free and easy travel. I read an economic report a while back (still trying to find it) that posited that a significant contributor to the US's current economic success and high rate of entrepreneurial system was the USPS. The ability for everybody to mail anything anywhere on the cheap allowed for an untold number of companies to exist and be competitive. To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
> Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. I agree with this 100%, and thank you for stating it so clearly. > We agree that society as a whole benefits from [...] Well, not all of us agree, but certainly a large majority. > To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor. It also sets up a hell of a strawman for the abolition of taxation in general - if the goal is for the individual to pay based on their consumption, then the most effective means of achieving that with the lowest possible overhead would be to allow a competitive marketplace to develop for those things. For the record, I do support the abolition of all taxation, but find this argument to be very poorly constructed. My justification is that taxation is instituted through the implicit threat of violence. That said, from a practical standpoint, if we're going to have a government funded through taxation, it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible. That means the ruleset should be as simple as possible, and that using taxation powers to modify behavior should be done rarely if ever in order to maintain that simplicity.
- zaksoup 8y ago
  To be clear, our government is not funded through taxation. If the government is the sole issuer of a currency then the government is also capable of paying for anything and everything priced in that currency, full stop. To put it another way... Question: those dollars you have in your pocket, where'd they come from? Answer: The government issued them and they eventually found their way to me Question: How'd the government have them to issue them? Answer: They taxed it from somebody else. Question: How'd that person get those dollars? Taxation is a method of controlling inflation and the implicit threat of violence isn't directly related or due to taxation, but rather it's connected to the government's monopoly on a fiat currency. Our government is funded through being the monopoly issuer of a currency that it requires all transactions be priced in while enforcing that monopoly with the implicit threat of violence. Our government (and all governments that are monopoly issuers of fiat currency) additionally use taxation as methods of economic control, but not funding. > it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible I'm not sure I agree with this. If the government is going to tax as a method of inflation control it's in our best interest that that taxation does the "least harm" and as a democratic society we have the opportunity to vigorously debate based on evidence and research how we define "least harm". The simplest ruleset possible could easily be "everybody contributes $30k/year" (more or less what my annual tax burden is) but suddenly we're bankrupting a majority of Americans. Perhaps "as possible" includes an implicit "without bankrupting a majority of individuals subject to the tax" but at that point "as possible" is just a doorway to say "taxing should be simple [except when it can't be]" and to me that's the same as saying "taxing is complicated" which is, finally, to say that I think it's really a whole lot of nothing interesting to say "I think tax rules should be simple". Edit: And yes, I understand that State taxes (as opposed to federal taxes) do fund State services (Property Taxes -> Schools in CA, for ex), but the States are not monopoly issuers of a fiat currency... It's complicated and hairy but the reason I bring up the issue of funding via taxes vs. issuing dollars is because almost always in conversations about flat tax rates or "simplifying tax code" it's in reference to federal taxes and not state/local taxes.
  - ric2b 7y ago
    What about the money banks create through fractional reserve lending? That ends up being significantly larger than the currency issued by the government, so the government might actually get more revenue from taxes than from money printing.

jogjayr 8y ago

Taxes aren't just about consumption of government services. If you earn more, you've clearly benefited from living in that society more than someone who does not. Or, as an economist would put it, it's price discrimination - charging more to the customer who gets more value out of the product.

nybble41 8y ago
> If you earn more, you've clearly benefited from living in that society more than someone who does not. No, those who consume more have benefited more. Earning more is just the opposite: it shows that you've provided more benefit to society than someone who earns less. The ones who benefit most from society are the ones who manage to consume more than they earn.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  There is little to no correlation of benefit to society provided and salary gained. Nobel prize winning scientists are generally not poverty-stricken, but they rarely make anything close to what a successful Wall Street stockbroker does, for example.
- jogjayr 8y ago
  > No, those who consume more have benefited more. Usually you can consume more if you have earned more i.e. have more buying power. But I know that's not what you mean. > Earning more is just the opposite: it shows that you've provided more benefit to society than someone who earns less. They're not very strongly correlated. It's possible to provide value without seeing much in reward (janitors, nurses, schoolteachers), earn plenty without providing much or even negative value (telemarketers, those opioid manufacturers we're hearing about), or both provide value and earn $$$ (Google, StackOverflow). In any case the taxman doesn't care about "value" provided to society because it's such a nebulous concept. The IRS doesn't let you take deductions for adding value or add extra taxes because you're a telemarketer. Even if you provided a ton of value to society while getting rich, you still got rich. And your society's enforcement of laws and property rights, educated citizenry, and infrastructure were likely crucial to this. > The ones who benefit most from society are the ones who manage to consume more than they earn. This is true in the case of those who inherit large fortunes/trust funds and don't work. Tax laws favor them greatly at present (lower estate and capital gains taxes). It's not true at the other end of the scale though. If not having a job and being on food stamps/medicaid/unemployment was really all that great, you'd have far more people looking to get in on it. It's actually a miserable situation that most people work their hardest to never fall into.