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Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definiti

Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems. For example, people "need" access to healthcare, but there's essentially an unlimited amount of money you could spend to keep improving healthcare (e.g. opting for increasingly expensive treatments with diminishing returns on health outcomes). The more money you allocate to healthcare, the less you have available to spend on other things that people "need". Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources. As another example, people "need" criminals to be punished in order to be able to live in a safe a crime-free society. People also "need" to not be put in prison when they are innocent. But you can never be 100% sure that a convicted criminal actually committed the crime. Locking up criminals implies by necessity that you will also lock up some innocent people. No government can solve both of these problems simultaneously which means they are all "bad". Even the most competent "good" government ultimately has to select among which "bad" things it is going to allow to continue and which it will solve.

danans 1y ago
> Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources. Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few. A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.
- jbstack 1y ago
  > Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less Who is "we"? We're talking about governments in general ("good" vs "bad" ones), and I have no idea what jurisdiction you are referring to. In any case, I didn't say the tap is dry. I said if you keep raising taxes it will eventually run dry. Or to put it another way, taxes are not an unlimited resource that you can keep increasing as much as you'd like. At some point you'll hit a ceiling where raising taxes any further doesn't produce additional tax revenue. For example, as you raise income tax rates, people have less incentive to advance their careers (e.g. by chasing promotions or improving their skills), and people have more incentive to leave the jurisdiction and go somewhere with lower taxes. Up to a point, the increase in tax rates produces a net extra revenue for the government. Above a certain point, the number of people who stop paying taxes (e.g. by leaving or by working less) outweighs the gains from those who continue to pay. This is why you'll rarely see any government with excessively high top-bracket tax rates (e.g. 60 - 100%), because it results in tax losses.
  - MrOwen 1y ago
    How are you coming to the conclusion that it will run dry? For example, in the US, arguably the most prosperous period here was in the first half of the 1900s. It is when Roosevelt's New Deal went into place and the US experienced extraordinary growth and prosperity. Do you know what also coincided with this? The marginal income tax rate. From wikipedia: > For tax years 1944 through 1951, the highest marginal tax rate for individuals was 91%, increasing to 92% for 1952 and 1953, and reverting to 91% 1954 through 1963. Since that time, the income tax rate has declined, especially for the higher brackets. From my perspective, it kinda just sounds like wealthy people got greedy and they were able to advocate for income tax changes. Back then, they couldn't pull as much funny business as they do today with high compensation modalities ($1 trillion for Musk?) so they opted for marginal tax rate reduction. But there's no evidence from what I can see that the the money was about to "run dry." Quite the opposite it seems. Even in nordic countries, the money is not "running dry". They have great support systems in large part because of the high marginal tax rates.
    - jbstack 1y ago
      Consider what would happen if the tax rate was 100% across all tax types, and you'll probably see then how there's an upper limit to how much tax revenue can be raised by a government. Would you get up and go to work if you got to keep 0% of your earnings? How about if you got to keep 1% of them? 2%? Surely we can agree that there is a threshold, even if we don't agree where that threshold is. That's all there is to the point I'm trying to make: tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.
      - danans 1y ago
        > tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like. That's a strawman. There are no proposals for a 100% tax across tax types. There is an argument for reversing the direction of the last several decades in which taxes on the wealthiest have been dramatically cut.
- jonas21 1y ago
  > Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. Assuming "we" means the United States, this isn't really true. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, not just since the 1980s, but since the end of World War II [1]. The long-term average since 1945 is 16.85%, the average in the 1970s (i.e. the decade before the 80s) was 16.76%, and the average in the 2020s is 16.96%. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. In the US at least, that’s the perception because the tax cuts get a lot more publicity than the increases; everyone know that Reagan passed what was, to that time, the biggest (at least in aggregate nominal terms) tax cut in US history, fewer know that he followed it with the biggest increase. But what has actually happened is a series of tax burden shifts (often, downward from the wealthiest, though some have been the other way or largely orthogonal to wealth.)
- b112 1y ago
  Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few. A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear. Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care". None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position. Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what". This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?
  - danans 1y ago
    > Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what". > This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that? Sure. That's like saying fire is hot and water is wet. The fact that tradeoffs obviously exist doesn't mean we can make meaningful changes to improve things.
    - b112 1y ago
      I think you mean "doesn't mean we can't", but you seem to be hyper-focusing on the summary statement I wrote, of the original author's post. That summary statement was in place to explain why your original post wasn't addressing the issue. But that statement was summarizing a portion of the original author's post. If placed back in the context it came from, you can see the original author was not saying we cannot make meaningful changes. At all. Instead, the author was said: Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems. Thus, they are not defining this as a "we cannot improve things", but instead "if we improve things, some will see that as bad" conjoined with "in other cases, we improve things, but not as fast/completely as desired". As far as I can see, there is not a single point that the original author said we cannot improve things. They don't even hint at that.
- attila-lendvai 1y ago
  sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it? (research hint: inflation, and that millennia old quote/insight: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government...)
  - danans 1y ago
    > sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it? Neither. Government is just the system through which policy that either greatness or lessens inequality is implemented. For example, government can decrease an inheritance tax, therefore increasing inequality, or they can do the opposite to reverse it.
estimator7292 1y ago
Everything is bad if we simply redefine "good" to mean "immaculately perfect and infallible in literally all conceivable scenarios"
- jbstack 1y ago
  Sure. But the original commenter's point that whether a government is "good" or "bad" is subjective because it's dependent on people's views. Other commenters objected to that and appear to see it as objective: a government is either clearly good or clearly bad, and there's no debate to be had. The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.
npoc 1y ago
There is no man-made global warming crisis. The earth is in fact one of the coldest periods in history. Thoroughly explained here: https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU What the "man-made global warming crisis" is, is an example of how a corrupt/captured state will overreach and control the people for its own gain through manipulation. Many governments are captured by the now global financial system that has almost unlimited power due to its money printers. It charges interest on money that it prints out of thin air. By leveraging its existing power to steer the governments to spend money it is able to effectively spend printed money (governemnt loans) on itself and then receive interest on that money as a bonus. A positive feedback loop that ends in global domination by the unelected financial system with the national and international central banks at its heart. Even worse is that it's power obtained essentially through fraud - it's all based on lending out something for interest that isn't theirs. It started with them lending out gold that people had given them to safely look after in their vaults.
- n4r9 1y ago
  Requiring people to watch a 1hr+ video to understand your argument is a big red flag.
  - npoc 1y ago
    Why's that? A topic as big as this takes quite a lot of refuting. If you're interested in finding the truth, then you'll at least begin watching it to see if it offers any promise.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      The trouble with videos is you can just... choose not to include stuff that obviously refutes your argument. The reality is that global warming is definitely happening, and also the Earth is definitely not flat. But it's pretty easy to make a super convincing argument that the Earth is flat - you just don't mention any of the math behind why the Earth is round and then you can have a 5 hour long video filled to the brim with evidence the Earth is flat. And it's not even lying. We're not saying anything that's not true. We're just choosing to omit data and evidence that proves us wrong. We can even include fake data and evidence, if we want, and refute that - ie build a strawman.

danans 1y ago

> Sure, you can tax more up to a point, but eventually that tap runs dry and you're forced to reallocate existing resources. Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few. A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.

jbstack 1y ago
> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less Who is "we"? We're talking about governments in general ("good" vs "bad" ones), and I have no idea what jurisdiction you are referring to. In any case, I didn't say the tap is dry. I said if you keep raising taxes it will eventually run dry. Or to put it another way, taxes are not an unlimited resource that you can keep increasing as much as you'd like. At some point you'll hit a ceiling where raising taxes any further doesn't produce additional tax revenue. For example, as you raise income tax rates, people have less incentive to advance their careers (e.g. by chasing promotions or improving their skills), and people have more incentive to leave the jurisdiction and go somewhere with lower taxes. Up to a point, the increase in tax rates produces a net extra revenue for the government. Above a certain point, the number of people who stop paying taxes (e.g. by leaving or by working less) outweighs the gains from those who continue to pay. This is why you'll rarely see any government with excessively high top-bracket tax rates (e.g. 60 - 100%), because it results in tax losses.
- MrOwen 1y ago
  How are you coming to the conclusion that it will run dry? For example, in the US, arguably the most prosperous period here was in the first half of the 1900s. It is when Roosevelt's New Deal went into place and the US experienced extraordinary growth and prosperity. Do you know what also coincided with this? The marginal income tax rate. From wikipedia: > For tax years 1944 through 1951, the highest marginal tax rate for individuals was 91%, increasing to 92% for 1952 and 1953, and reverting to 91% 1954 through 1963. Since that time, the income tax rate has declined, especially for the higher brackets. From my perspective, it kinda just sounds like wealthy people got greedy and they were able to advocate for income tax changes. Back then, they couldn't pull as much funny business as they do today with high compensation modalities ($1 trillion for Musk?) so they opted for marginal tax rate reduction. But there's no evidence from what I can see that the the money was about to "run dry." Quite the opposite it seems. Even in nordic countries, the money is not "running dry". They have great support systems in large part because of the high marginal tax rates.
  - jbstack 1y ago
    Consider what would happen if the tax rate was 100% across all tax types, and you'll probably see then how there's an upper limit to how much tax revenue can be raised by a government. Would you get up and go to work if you got to keep 0% of your earnings? How about if you got to keep 1% of them? 2%? Surely we can agree that there is a threshold, even if we don't agree where that threshold is. That's all there is to the point I'm trying to make: tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.
    - danans 1y ago
      > tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like. That's a strawman. There are no proposals for a 100% tax across tax types. There is an argument for reversing the direction of the last several decades in which taxes on the wealthiest have been dramatically cut.
jonas21 1y ago
> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. Assuming "we" means the United States, this isn't really true. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, not just since the 1980s, but since the end of World War II [1]. The long-term average since 1945 is 16.85%, the average in the 1970s (i.e. the decade before the 80s) was 16.76%, and the average in the 2020s is 16.96%. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. In the US at least, that’s the perception because the tax cuts get a lot more publicity than the increases; everyone know that Reagan passed what was, to that time, the biggest (at least in aggregate nominal terms) tax cut in US history, fewer know that he followed it with the biggest increase. But what has actually happened is a series of tax burden shifts (often, downward from the wealthiest, though some have been the other way or largely orthogonal to wealth.)
b112 1y ago
Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few. A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear. Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care". None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position. Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what". This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?
- danans 1y ago
  > Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what". > This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that? Sure. That's like saying fire is hot and water is wet. The fact that tradeoffs obviously exist doesn't mean we can make meaningful changes to improve things.
  - b112 1y ago
    I think you mean "doesn't mean we can't", but you seem to be hyper-focusing on the summary statement I wrote, of the original author's post. That summary statement was in place to explain why your original post wasn't addressing the issue. But that statement was summarizing a portion of the original author's post. If placed back in the context it came from, you can see the original author was not saying we cannot make meaningful changes. At all. Instead, the author was said: Aside from the fact that there's a subjective definition problem here (how do we decide what people "need"?), I think this an unrealistic view. By this definition, every government that has ever existed or ever will exist is a "bad" government because no government can ever tackle every single problem 100% of the time. Many problems are extremely difficult to solve (e.g. global warming), and others simply cannot be solved without creating other problems. Thus, they are not defining this as a "we cannot improve things", but instead "if we improve things, some will see that as bad" conjoined with "in other cases, we improve things, but not as fast/completely as desired". As far as I can see, there is not a single point that the original author said we cannot improve things. They don't even hint at that.
attila-lendvai 1y ago
sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it? (research hint: inflation, and that millennia old quote/insight: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government...)
- danans 1y ago
  > sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it? Neither. Government is just the system through which policy that either greatness or lessens inequality is implemented. For example, government can decrease an inheritance tax, therefore increasing inequality, or they can do the opposite to reverse it.

estimator7292 1y ago

Everything is bad if we simply redefine "good" to mean "immaculately perfect and infallible in literally all conceivable scenarios"

jbstack 1y ago
Sure. But the original commenter's point that whether a government is "good" or "bad" is subjective because it's dependent on people's views. Other commenters objected to that and appear to see it as objective: a government is either clearly good or clearly bad, and there's no debate to be had. The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.

npoc 1y ago

There is no man-made global warming crisis. The earth is in fact one of the coldest periods in history. Thoroughly explained here: https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU https://youtu.be/KDwCUAueLUU What the "man-made global warming crisis" is, is an example of how a corrupt/captured state will overreach and control the people for its own gain through manipulation. Many governments are captured by the now global financial system that has almost unlimited power due to its money printers. It charges interest on money that it prints out of thin air. By leveraging its existing power to steer the governments to spend money it is able to effectively spend printed money (governemnt loans) on itself and then receive interest on that money as a bonus. A positive feedback loop that ends in global domination by the unelected financial system with the national and international central banks at its heart. Even worse is that it's power obtained essentially through fraud - it's all based on lending out something for interest that isn't theirs. It started with them lending out gold that people had given them to safely look after in their vaults.

n4r9 1y ago
Requiring people to watch a 1hr+ video to understand your argument is a big red flag.
- npoc 1y ago
  Why's that? A topic as big as this takes quite a lot of refuting. If you're interested in finding the truth, then you'll at least begin watching it to see if it offers any promise.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The trouble with videos is you can just... choose not to include stuff that obviously refutes your argument. The reality is that global warming is definitely happening, and also the Earth is definitely not flat. But it's pretty easy to make a super convincing argument that the Earth is flat - you just don't mention any of the math behind why the Earth is round and then you can have a 5 hour long video filled to the brim with evidence the Earth is flat. And it's not even lying. We're not saying anything that's not true. We're just choosing to omit data and evidence that proves us wrong. We can even include fake data and evidence, if we want, and refute that - ie build a strawman.