4 ms·

Why can't social responsibility be handled at a different layer, though? Why is it the individual businessman who has to pay special taxes for things like that?

• phillmv 15y ago
  >Why not just take it from general taxes across the board? Politics. Most people don't see or hear about payroll taxes, but they would notice if you added 5% to their income taxes. Plus, in a lot of cases it's administratively easier to say "the funding for this social program comes directly from this source of taxation". You're right that taxes should be designed better; in a lot of cases they provide disincentives for a lot of beneficial behaviour. Taxes are just really hard to design correctly. It's a huge problem no one has control over.
  • itmag 15y ago
    This leads to an interesting digression... My hacker's mind sees society the same way it sees ie software layers, kernels, APIs, libraries, etc. And from that POV, current society practices seem very inefficient and disorganized, and could be improved readily with a dollop of hacker values (eg lazy but smart) and cold hard logic. One example: I am becoming more and more in favor of a minimum guaranteed income provided by society. Here are some good arguments in favor of that: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-income/ http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc... Of course a MGI is heresy in today's society because we are still in a mindset where it's crucial that everyone pull their own weight lest other people suffer - a lingering meme from the days when 90% of the population was occupied with food production. This of course ignores the notions that 1) society is insanely productive thanks to automation and it requires very little labor to pay for the true necessities of life (see for instance http://www.earlyretirementextreme.com http://www.earlyretirementextreme.com - he lives on $7k a year) 2) many jobs today are marginally useful at best - think paper-shuffling mid-management 3) most of our income goes toward consumerist escapism which fails at making us truly fulfilled 4) much of the economy just exists to satisfy society's need for a status stratification mechanism (eg one is considered middle-class because one has such-and-such job title and education - if this classification went away then there would be general status confusion). Then again, trying to fix society the same way one re-factors code may be hubris on my part...
    • zhemao 15y ago
      In order to afford such a plan, governments would have to impose really high taxes. That would be a much bigger disincentive to production than the safety net itself.
      • itmag 15y ago
        The government (at least in Sweden) already imposes really high taxes. And people here are still generally wealthy as fuck (relative to most of the world) and able to use a large chunk of their income for beer, trendy clothes, smartphones, restaurants, travel, etc (ie nice-to-have luxury goods). It's all a matter of perspective IMHO. Of course, I'm generally leary of "solutions" that come out of the gov't but that's another story...
        • rprasad 15y ago
          Sweden's wealth is made possible by the relative abundance of natural resources for its size and population: it's population (~9 million) is just a bit larger than that of the San Francisco Bay Area, but it has a GDP of $443.718 billion (i.e., higher per capita than most American states, including California).
    • ScottBurson 15y ago
      Yes, I've long supported the so-called "negative income tax" -- the name is confusing; what it means is that below a certain income level, the IRS gives you money instead of you having to pay it, with the amount you receive being a monotonically increasing function of your income that is zero at the same income at which your tax reaches zero. Personally I've long been inclined to the view that we should replace our existing welfare, unemployment, and Social Security systems with the NIT. Although SS has been sold as a retirement savings system, it is really a transfer payment system, a reality that is starting to become inescapable. It's just not right, I believe, for a transfer payment system not to involve means-testing -- there's no way to justify taking money from young middle-class workers, many with families, to support retirees who are well off anyway. For some very interesting arguments against the NIT, backed by some experimental data, see: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html I actually think the problems could probably be solved, but I have to grant that they are nontrivial.
  • sopooneo 15y ago
    Income tax and payroll tax seem to me to effectively be the same layer. Yes, there will be a psychological difference when people see how much is taken out of their paychecks, but that's about it.
• henrikschroder 15y ago
  What do you think is more effective and cheaper? Legislate against discriminating against females of a certain age and punish companies that violate it, or increase the corporate tax with x%, have Skatteverket collect it, and politicians to re-distribute it in such a way as to provide jobs for females around 30?