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Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

idle_zealot 5mo ago
Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
- jandrewrogers 5mo ago
  > destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
  - gazebo2 5mo ago
    Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns
  - tormeh 5mo ago
    The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.
  - idle_zealot 5mo ago
    I guess I need to clarify that I don't support lighting farms on fire. Wealth is liquid, it's the abstract concept of who owns what, who has the right to compel behavior. A destructive tax is just one that doesn't have corresponding spending on the balance sheet. I'm also not even saying that's a good policy, just better than what we're doing now. There are trivial improvements, like spending it on paying off the national debt.
  - nullocator 5mo ago
    I don't think I can personally farm a Yacht into existence, so not sure that holds water. Over the last several years the "value" of several of my skills has basically gone to zero as technology advanced, so I'm not sure that I buy in the modern era at least skills are a good indicator of wealth either, nor can I likely acquire a Yacht with pure skill alone. I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    If we did it today the tax would be money. It doesn't make sense for the government to seize 2% of a factory. I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.
webdood90 5mo ago
> Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.
wrqvrwvq 5mo ago
I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things. The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it. I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all. It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation. The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.
- timbray 5mo ago
  I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them. On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.
  - wrqvrwvq 5mo ago
    These kinds of operations are rampant in all cities. There's a line of people to waiting to sell their ebt/stamps. https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410 https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410
- webdood90 5mo ago
BrenBarn 5mo ago
We don't need to use the tax on government bureaucracy. We can just give it right back out as direct payments to the non-wealthy.

idle_zealot 5mo ago

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.

jandrewrogers 5mo ago
> destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
- gazebo2 5mo ago
  Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns
- tormeh 5mo ago
  The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  I guess I need to clarify that I don't support lighting farms on fire. Wealth is liquid, it's the abstract concept of who owns what, who has the right to compel behavior. A destructive tax is just one that doesn't have corresponding spending on the balance sheet. I'm also not even saying that's a good policy, just better than what we're doing now. There are trivial improvements, like spending it on paying off the national debt.
- nullocator 5mo ago
  I don't think I can personally farm a Yacht into existence, so not sure that holds water. Over the last several years the "value" of several of my skills has basically gone to zero as technology advanced, so I'm not sure that I buy in the modern era at least skills are a good indicator of wealth either, nor can I likely acquire a Yacht with pure skill alone. I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  If we did it today the tax would be money. It doesn't make sense for the government to seize 2% of a factory. I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.

webdood90 5mo ago

> Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.

wrqvrwvq 5mo ago

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things. The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it. I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all. It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation. The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

timbray 5mo ago
I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them. On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.
- wrqvrwvq 5mo ago
  These kinds of operations are rampant in all cities. There's a line of people to waiting to sell their ebt/stamps. https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410 https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410
webdood90 5mo ago

BrenBarn 5mo ago

We don't need to use the tax on government bureaucracy. We can just give it right back out as direct payments to the non-wealthy.