3 ms·

Little bit smaller government and so a lot less to pay for.

• ggm 4y ago
  "Little" being ironically applied. Serfdom, short lifespan, and no Antibiotics research alongside massive amounts of routine child abuse and women as a subclass. Great!
  • cplusplusfellow 4y ago
    I would venture the features you apply above would amount to less than 20% of the US budget. Particularly if you exclude social security and Medicare, which both have their own taxes and surtaxes even.
• jackcosgrove 4y ago
  I looked at the article for numbers, and the closest I could find was that a trirarch paid many multiples of a laborer's yearly salary. That could mean the benefactor was shouldering a large burden, or that the benefactors were stupendously wealthy compared to the average laborer and the financial obligation was not heavy for them. I don't know what the case was. I could find no estimates of total tax burden, which at this point would be mostly conjecture but better than nothing. Compared to a modern-day country like Belgium or France, where the tax burden is about 44-46% of GDP, I would wager that the Athenian tax burden was very low as a fraction of the economy. To achieve modern levels of taxation you need a bureaucracy which did not exist in classical Athens.
  • whakim 4y ago
    I speculated about the tax burden in another post, but levels of inequality were much higher in the ancient world then they are today. Putting aside that TFA doesn't really define "average laborer," 20 years of a "skilled" salary sounds like a relatively small amount of money to the wealthiest 1%.