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Also, these days the complexity of our creations is such that almost never could one person really personally succeed without the contribution of others. A co

by blunte 6y ago

Also, these days the complexity of our creations is such that almost never could one person really personally succeed without the contribution of others. A common complaint among some groups is that they worked really hard and built successful businesses, and they shouldn’t be taxed to pay for services that do not benefit them. But they neglect to account for the infrastructure, relative availability of educated workforce, and even regional economic stability which allows others to reliably consume their products.

seibelj 6y ago
My issue with taxes is that whenever there’s a funding problem, the knee jerk reaction is to increase taxes rather than make the government more efficient. In business, the pressure is always to be more efficient. As a result, the government trends towards bloat, inefficiency, and waste. And when someone suggests (gasp!) eliminating positions rather than raising ever more tax, some people think you are a heartless jerk, rather than an advocate for prudent and frugal use of limited funds.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >some people think you are a heartless jerk I think this comes down to a fundamental miscommunication. No one is going to believe you are a heartless jerk for advocating for more efficient, effective practices in government. The values judgment comes in when the services being cut are those that provide tangible, critical value to individuals in society - think social welfare programs. Because cuts are never accompanied by a plan for efficiency, cuts always mean services get worse. Therefore, individuals who receive vital services suffer. Then comes the 'heartless jerk' values judgment. Maybe all budget cuts need to be precipitated by a process evaluation and bloat reduction. The issue is, that game is too easy to rig and too tempting to play; for proof, see literally any large corporation's budget and planning processes. Fiefdoms abound. I don't know how to fix the problem. I have always said that I would gladly pay 75% of my salary in taxes, as long as everyone in society had easy, equal access to high quality education, quality, safe housing, nutritious, safe food, and high quality, timely healthcare. The problem is, any society structured to provide those things will immediately be corrupted by greedy, power-hungry people. Getting a little too philosophical, I think. Anyway. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm hopeful that there is one.
- minikites 6y ago
  Why does government need to be efficient? The entire point of a government service is that it helps everyone in society, which is necessarily inefficient. Private companies can afford to be efficient because they can refuse service or refuse to enter certain markets.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    Just as a note - I'm someone who advocates that government should absolutely be run at a complete loss. But inefficient and providing service to everyone are not necessarily the same thing. Planned inefficiencies is what are important. For example - the college I work at knows that we're going to lose our shirts on every nursing student, something to the tune of 25k loss for every student, every year in that program. And because that is what the area needs, that is what we do. It's massively inefficient. It would, at a for-profit, be the first program to get cut. But we can plan for that loss, and make up for it in other areas. That's an efficient and effective inefficiency.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    A government needs to be efficient so that instead of spending $2 billion on a bridge to nowhere, or a bureaucracy that spends millions of hours pushing papers but accomplishes nothing of merit by doing so, or a public housing authority that pays its workers to sleep on the job rather than inspect or repair the boilers, or a public employee pension program that gives away millions when you game the system with excessive overtime your last year, or any other myriad ways to waste society’s resources achieving nothing and worse than nothing - instead of that, it gets something valuable done, and society can benefit from that something. Waste is not virtuous and you cannot prosper by continually breaking and repairing the same windows.
    - minikites 6y ago
      Why is the default assumption that these things are rampant in government and wholly absent in the private sector?
      - 6y ago
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  I think you are tilting at imaginary dragons considering that the plutocrats and largest corporations in America pay basically nothing in taxes. I don't disagree that government should try to be efficient, but government by its very nature takes on inefficiencies in society... regulations exist because of edge cases, welfare exists because some people are dealt a bad hand, et cetera. Government is not, and should not try to be, a business.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    You’re discounting this position based strictly on the fact that the taxes aren’t collected from the company, but companies are made of individuals, both those that work there and those that own shares in the company. They feel the burden of taxes elsewhere. Today, the top 5% of taxpayers pay 60% of federal income taxes. The top 20% will pay 87%.
    - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
      I'm also discounting this position based on the fact that the prime directive of government is not efficiency. Do you have a source for your numbers?
      - malandrew 6y ago
        It's pretty trivial to find many references with a quick Google search, but here you go: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
        i_haz_rabies 6y ago
        It's not on me to find sources for your numbers. Besides, doing a trivial, quick Google search comes up with a few links to anti-tax lobby groups (such as the one you provided). However, a slightly less trivial, slightly less quick look at the topic reveals that the figures in the anti-tax lobby group reports do not include capital gains, or really anything outside of federal income. It doesn't even include payroll tax. A few sources, admittedly biased the other way: - https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/where-do-federal-tax-revenues-come-from https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/where-do-federal-t... - https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-time-history-us-billionaires-paid-lower-tax-rate-than-working-class-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim... - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-less-taxes-than-working-class-wealth-gap-2019-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-l...
malandrew 6y ago
It would be fine if that’s all we pay for, but politicians find ever increasing ways to buy votes with other people’s money. If everyone felt the burden of taxes equally via a flat tax based strictly on consumption and consumption alone, I could get behind it. Right now however it’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And when Paul is the beneficiary of taxes and relatively unburdened, not only are they supportive of more taxes because it’s not their problem, but they also care not about the efficiency of how wisely those tax dollars are spent because it’s Peter footing the bill.
- Nursie 6y ago
  If everyone felt the burden of taxes equally via a flat tax based on consumption, the poor would be taxed proportionally the highest, the middle classes would also be worse off than now, and the richest few percent would love this as their proportion of income that goes on consumption is the lowest. It’s a massively regressive idea and pretty much by definition a flat tax based on consumption would not be felt equally at all.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    "flat tax" is a red herring that happens to be very appealing to a certain cluster of political ideologies. it's not necessarily regressive though. imagine a flat consumption tax where 90% of the proceeds were allocated to services for the bottom quintile. that would actually be quite a progressive tax system! that aside, my armchair economist opinion is that consumption is not a very good place to collect taxes in the first place. you want people to buy stuff from each other, don't discourage this!
    - Nursie 6y ago
      > imagine a flat consumption tax where 90% of the proceeds were allocated to services for the bottom quintile You'd still end up with the middle paying proportionally a lot more than the wealthiest. But yeah, in general I agree, I guess maybe that certain political mindset latches onto it as it appears to be an easy/straightforward place to apply it.
andrepd 6y ago
> A common complaint among some groups is that they worked really hard and built successful businesses, and they shouldn’t be taxed to pay for services that do not benefit them. But they neglect to account for the infrastructure, relative availability of educated workforce, and even regional economic stability which allows others to reliably consume their products. Absolutely hit the nail in the head. Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man". Take Amazon for instance: they benefit from roads and infrastructure. But they also benefit from things like police and courts to protect their private property, just like they rely on a workforce capable of meeting their demands. Ultimately, they also benefit from a stable society and mostly wealthy enough population to afford their products! And finally, one can say that they benefit from the work of the people who invented the Internet, who invented computers, who made the American Revolution, the ancient Greek philosophers and the medieval mathematicians and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in short: directly or indirectly from the combined work of every single human being which lived and has ever lived. That's what's hidden behind the simple word "society". And that's why no person is "self-made". For this, Amazon reaps enormous profit. They need to pay what's due: they owe a debt to society, for it was society that enabled their profit.

by blunte 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

My issue with taxes is that whenever there’s a funding problem, the knee jerk reaction is to increase taxes rather than make the government more efficient. In business, the pressure is always to be more efficient. As a result, the government trends towards bloat, inefficiency, and waste. And when someone suggests (gasp!) eliminating positions rather than raising ever more tax, some people think you are a heartless jerk, rather than an advocate for prudent and frugal use of limited funds.

Loughla 6y ago
>some people think you are a heartless jerk I think this comes down to a fundamental miscommunication. No one is going to believe you are a heartless jerk for advocating for more efficient, effective practices in government. The values judgment comes in when the services being cut are those that provide tangible, critical value to individuals in society - think social welfare programs. Because cuts are never accompanied by a plan for efficiency, cuts always mean services get worse. Therefore, individuals who receive vital services suffer. Then comes the 'heartless jerk' values judgment. Maybe all budget cuts need to be precipitated by a process evaluation and bloat reduction. The issue is, that game is too easy to rig and too tempting to play; for proof, see literally any large corporation's budget and planning processes. Fiefdoms abound. I don't know how to fix the problem. I have always said that I would gladly pay 75% of my salary in taxes, as long as everyone in society had easy, equal access to high quality education, quality, safe housing, nutritious, safe food, and high quality, timely healthcare. The problem is, any society structured to provide those things will immediately be corrupted by greedy, power-hungry people. Getting a little too philosophical, I think. Anyway. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm hopeful that there is one.
minikites 6y ago
Why does government need to be efficient? The entire point of a government service is that it helps everyone in society, which is necessarily inefficient. Private companies can afford to be efficient because they can refuse service or refuse to enter certain markets.
- Loughla 6y ago
  Just as a note - I'm someone who advocates that government should absolutely be run at a complete loss. But inefficient and providing service to everyone are not necessarily the same thing. Planned inefficiencies is what are important. For example - the college I work at knows that we're going to lose our shirts on every nursing student, something to the tune of 25k loss for every student, every year in that program. And because that is what the area needs, that is what we do. It's massively inefficient. It would, at a for-profit, be the first program to get cut. But we can plan for that loss, and make up for it in other areas. That's an efficient and effective inefficiency.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  A government needs to be efficient so that instead of spending $2 billion on a bridge to nowhere, or a bureaucracy that spends millions of hours pushing papers but accomplishes nothing of merit by doing so, or a public housing authority that pays its workers to sleep on the job rather than inspect or repair the boilers, or a public employee pension program that gives away millions when you game the system with excessive overtime your last year, or any other myriad ways to waste society’s resources achieving nothing and worse than nothing - instead of that, it gets something valuable done, and society can benefit from that something. Waste is not virtuous and you cannot prosper by continually breaking and repairing the same windows.
  - minikites 6y ago
    Why is the default assumption that these things are rampant in government and wholly absent in the private sector?
    - 6y ago
i_haz_rabies 6y ago
I think you are tilting at imaginary dragons considering that the plutocrats and largest corporations in America pay basically nothing in taxes. I don't disagree that government should try to be efficient, but government by its very nature takes on inefficiencies in society... regulations exist because of edge cases, welfare exists because some people are dealt a bad hand, et cetera. Government is not, and should not try to be, a business.
- malandrew 6y ago
  You’re discounting this position based strictly on the fact that the taxes aren’t collected from the company, but companies are made of individuals, both those that work there and those that own shares in the company. They feel the burden of taxes elsewhere. Today, the top 5% of taxpayers pay 60% of federal income taxes. The top 20% will pay 87%.
  - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
    I'm also discounting this position based on the fact that the prime directive of government is not efficiency. Do you have a source for your numbers?
    - malandrew 6y ago
      It's pretty trivial to find many references with a quick Google search, but here you go: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
      - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
        It's not on me to find sources for your numbers. Besides, doing a trivial, quick Google search comes up with a few links to anti-tax lobby groups (such as the one you provided). However, a slightly less trivial, slightly less quick look at the topic reveals that the figures in the anti-tax lobby group reports do not include capital gains, or really anything outside of federal income. It doesn't even include payroll tax. A few sources, admittedly biased the other way: - https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/where-do-federal-tax-revenues-come-from https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/where-do-federal-t... - https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-time-history-us-billionaires-paid-lower-tax-rate-than-working-class-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim... - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-less-taxes-than-working-class-wealth-gap-2019-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-l...

malandrew 6y ago

It would be fine if that’s all we pay for, but politicians find ever increasing ways to buy votes with other people’s money. If everyone felt the burden of taxes equally via a flat tax based strictly on consumption and consumption alone, I could get behind it. Right now however it’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And when Paul is the beneficiary of taxes and relatively unburdened, not only are they supportive of more taxes because it’s not their problem, but they also care not about the efficiency of how wisely those tax dollars are spent because it’s Peter footing the bill.

Nursie 6y ago
If everyone felt the burden of taxes equally via a flat tax based on consumption, the poor would be taxed proportionally the highest, the middle classes would also be worse off than now, and the richest few percent would love this as their proportion of income that goes on consumption is the lowest. It’s a massively regressive idea and pretty much by definition a flat tax based on consumption would not be felt equally at all.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  "flat tax" is a red herring that happens to be very appealing to a certain cluster of political ideologies. it's not necessarily regressive though. imagine a flat consumption tax where 90% of the proceeds were allocated to services for the bottom quintile. that would actually be quite a progressive tax system! that aside, my armchair economist opinion is that consumption is not a very good place to collect taxes in the first place. you want people to buy stuff from each other, don't discourage this!
  - Nursie 6y ago
    > imagine a flat consumption tax where 90% of the proceeds were allocated to services for the bottom quintile You'd still end up with the middle paying proportionally a lot more than the wealthiest. But yeah, in general I agree, I guess maybe that certain political mindset latches onto it as it appears to be an easy/straightforward place to apply it.

andrepd 6y ago

> A common complaint among some groups is that they worked really hard and built successful businesses, and they shouldn’t be taxed to pay for services that do not benefit them. But they neglect to account for the infrastructure, relative availability of educated workforce, and even regional economic stability which allows others to reliably consume their products. Absolutely hit the nail in the head. Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man". Take Amazon for instance: they benefit from roads and infrastructure. But they also benefit from things like police and courts to protect their private property, just like they rely on a workforce capable of meeting their demands. Ultimately, they also benefit from a stable society and mostly wealthy enough population to afford their products! And finally, one can say that they benefit from the work of the people who invented the Internet, who invented computers, who made the American Revolution, the ancient Greek philosophers and the medieval mathematicians and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in short: directly or indirectly from the combined work of every single human being which lived and has ever lived. That's what's hidden behind the simple word "society". And that's why no person is "self-made". For this, Amazon reaps enormous profit. They need to pay what's due: they owe a debt to society, for it was society that enabled their profit.