2 ms·

> If you care about economic success of the country, the goal isn't 'collect as many taxes as possible'. The goal is to make the citizens wealthier in real term

by Drakim 2y ago

> If you care about economic success of the country, the goal isn't 'collect as many taxes as possible'. The goal is to make the citizens wealthier in real terms. Just like how "collect as many taxes as possible" isn't actually a good goal, just "make the citizens wealthier" isn't actually a good goal either because it says nothing about the distribution of that wealth. If we enacted a law that made 99.9% of all citizens absolutely destitute to the point where they must eat rotten food found in the trash to survive, but this law also multiplied the wealth of Bezos and Elon a millionfold, then that would successfully "make the citizens wealthier" in sum. Taxes are used to run society, from it's roads, fire department, education, social services, and much more. A lot of people are pushing to cut down on those things, to decrease the bounty that society offers regular people who partake, because "we just can't afford it." and the reason we can't afford it is because there is an overly focus on "make the citizens wealthier" even at the cost of most citizens.

gottorf 2y ago
> Taxes are used to run society, from it's roads, fire department, education, social services, and much more The "much more" is much, much, much more than anyone thinks. The federal budget is tremendous. People cannot conceive of trillions, yet the federal government alone spent over six of it a year, three years in a row. Virtually nobody has a problem with tax funds being used to build roads and bridges, fire departments, and whatnot. It's everything else that's contentious. Public schools are visibly wasteful, with the number of students and teachers overall remaining largely constant, but the number of administrators having increased many-fold in the past decades; at this point it's a jobs scheme for adults, not an education scheme for children. Nonprofits received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support illegal immigration. Et cetera. So many things in the federal budget appeal to a fringe minority of advocates, yet the money hose continues to flow. This is not the way that a federal government with clearly delineated limits should work. Something is wrong.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > It's everything else that's contentious. In part, because of comments using wording like "hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars" as if it were huge, when it describes a pretty miniscule part of the 6,000,000 millions in the budget. (It also misses those same immigrants paying billions in sales and other taxes here, including quite a bit of Medicare/Social Security funding they'll never get back.) As a result, Americans have a massively skewed idea of where it all goes; they think NASA gets 6.4% of the budget when it gets 0.5%, for example. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-budget-estimates-opinions-poll-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-budget-estimates-opinio... Defense, healthcare, and social security make up the vast majority of Federal expenses. Education is, comparatively, a pittance; nonprofits serving immigrants don't even show up on the chart as a full pixel. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Mandatory_Outlays.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Mand... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Discretionary_Outlays.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Disc...
- beart 2y ago
  Most public education funding at the K-12 level is from state and local taxes.
  - voxic11 2y ago
    Yeah, to be more specific: > The federal government provides 10.5% of funding for public K-12 education. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

by Drakim 2y ago

gottorf 2y ago

> Taxes are used to run society, from it's roads, fire department, education, social services, and much more The "much more" is much, much, much more than anyone thinks. The federal budget is tremendous. People cannot conceive of trillions, yet the federal government alone spent over six of it a year, three years in a row. Virtually nobody has a problem with tax funds being used to build roads and bridges, fire departments, and whatnot. It's everything else that's contentious. Public schools are visibly wasteful, with the number of students and teachers overall remaining largely constant, but the number of administrators having increased many-fold in the past decades; at this point it's a jobs scheme for adults, not an education scheme for children. Nonprofits received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support illegal immigration. Et cetera. So many things in the federal budget appeal to a fringe minority of advocates, yet the money hose continues to flow. This is not the way that a federal government with clearly delineated limits should work. Something is wrong.

ceejayoz 2y ago
> It's everything else that's contentious. In part, because of comments using wording like "hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars" as if it were huge, when it describes a pretty miniscule part of the 6,000,000 millions in the budget. (It also misses those same immigrants paying billions in sales and other taxes here, including quite a bit of Medicare/Social Security funding they'll never get back.) As a result, Americans have a massively skewed idea of where it all goes; they think NASA gets 6.4% of the budget when it gets 0.5%, for example. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-budget-estimates-opinions-poll-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-budget-estimates-opinio... Defense, healthcare, and social security make up the vast majority of Federal expenses. Education is, comparatively, a pittance; nonprofits serving immigrants don't even show up on the chart as a full pixel. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Mandatory_Outlays.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Mand... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Discretionary_Outlays.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Disc...
beart 2y ago
Most public education funding at the K-12 level is from state and local taxes.
- voxic11 2y ago
  Yeah, to be more specific: > The federal government provides 10.5% of funding for public K-12 education. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...