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> Property owners benefit more from local tax spending than anyone else. Why shouldn't they pay for it? Couldn't you use the same argument to say that poor peo
by dataflow 4y ago
> Property owners benefit more from local tax spending than anyone else. Why shouldn't they pay for it?
Couldn't you use the same argument to say that poor people should pay more in taxes because they benefit more from it?
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoThat's nonsense. The richest people benefit the most from having a stable government with well-funded police protecting their property.
- dataflow 4y agoIt's not nonsense, you just looked at the extreme case on the other side. You can try to make arguments like that for the "richest" people, but what about everyone else? Someone making $1 below the Medicaid income limit should pay a ton more in taxes than someone making $1 above it because they get back a lot more in return?
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoIf they're benefiting so much, why are they poor? Clearly wealthier people are getting more benefit.
- yucky 4y agoDoes someone below the poverty level qualify for more government assistance than a middle class person?
- rafael09ed 4y agoDoes a middle class person have more choices in how they want to live their life?
- yucky 4y agoI didn't say being poor was better, this was in response to who uses more government services. And I'm not event stating it as a problem, I think poor people use more services because they need more services. But I thought it was important enough to correct the claim that they don't use more services.
- yakubin 4y ago> Clearly wealthier people are getting more benefit. No. Their wealth doesn’t come from government provided services.
- droopyEyelids 4y agoThe government defines how wealth works, what property is, and how people relate to and may benefit from it.
- yakubin 4y agoThat’s settled by law, not by the actions of the current government. If you want to pin down the source of how the wealthy can retain their wealth, that would be the courts and broader law enforcement. So going this way the wealthy would contribute more to the justice system, while they wouldn’t pay as much for public education, health services, and social welfare? Doesn’t seem like something anyone would want.
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoHow would law get enforced without taxes? Clearly the wealthier you are, the more benefit you are getting from taxes because the government stops everyone else from taking your wealth.
- yakubin 4y agoYeah, but they don’t benefit from public health services, since they can pay for a private insurance with a higher quality of services. They don’t benefit from social benefits, since they have much more efficient ways of making money. They don’t benefit from public schools personally, since they can send their children to private schools. So if I were to go with the reasoning that people should pay for received services proportionally to the benefit they get from them, I don’t think we’d end up with a system where the rich support the poor better. That’s all because the needs of the poor are very different from the needs of the rich.