6 ms·

The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and

by mmooss 6mo ago

The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time): 1) Cut taxes 2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending too much, and cut services 3) Repeat Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!

tmoertel 6mo ago
> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)... A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want. Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?
- mmooss 6mo ago
  I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy. (I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.) I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
  - tmoertel 6mo ago
    Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false. Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
    - ranger_danger 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - orwin 6mo ago
      > Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else? Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
      - tmoertel 6mo ago
        > Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments..., then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class. That if is doing a lot of lifting. What percentage of investments do you believe satisfy that if condition? If that percentage is p, then do you agree that it's generally beneficial for society, for approximately 100% − p percent of the time, when wealthy people decide to invest in the economy instead of spend on themselves? (Further, even when companies downsize, don't they release their resources, such as people and equipment, back to the market? And doesn't the evidence of economic history suggest that, on the whole, the market tends to take up resources, including those released from downsizing companies, and use them produce goods and services that benefit both the owning class and the working class? For example, for most of history, even the wealthiest of the owning class lacked electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, radio, television, electronic computers, the internet, cell phones, HDTVs, antibiotics, vaccines, generic drugs, medical imaging, DNA testing, video conferences with health care professionals, and so on. Today, don't even working people benefit from these things? So, even when your if condition holds, the claimed consequence, that such investments "either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class" seems hard to believe.)
- amavect 6mo ago
  Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M
  - tmoertel 6mo ago
    > Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. You forgot the most important part. Let me add it for you: "Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment..., while creating a job market, [and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole]." > The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits. You cannot eat a stock certificate, nor can you use it to heal an infection, nor can you ask it to repair your refrigerator. To receive a tangible benefit such as these, you must consume a good or service. And what is the economy but a machine that produces the goods and services that the people within it consume? Therefore, it is the mix of goods and services consumed (which equals that produced) that determines how society benefits. And, as you've already admitted, a low capital gains tax incentivizes the wealthy to buy paper assets instead of luxuries for themselves. But luxuries are real goods and services, aren't they? In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
    - amavect 6mo ago
inglor_cz 6mo ago
Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-spending.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s... BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple. Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs. With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
- mmooss 6mo ago
  I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses. And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data. > With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste. As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency. But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes. On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
pseudohadamard 5mo ago
Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines. I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.

by mmooss 6mo ago

tmoertel 6mo ago

> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)... A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want. Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?

mmooss 6mo ago
I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy. (I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.) I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
- tmoertel 6mo ago
  Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false. Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
  - ranger_danger 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - orwin 6mo ago
    > Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else? Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
    - tmoertel 6mo ago
      > Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments..., then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class. That if is doing a lot of lifting. What percentage of investments do you believe satisfy that if condition? If that percentage is p, then do you agree that it's generally beneficial for society, for approximately 100% − p percent of the time, when wealthy people decide to invest in the economy instead of spend on themselves? (Further, even when companies downsize, don't they release their resources, such as people and equipment, back to the market? And doesn't the evidence of economic history suggest that, on the whole, the market tends to take up resources, including those released from downsizing companies, and use them produce goods and services that benefit both the owning class and the working class? For example, for most of history, even the wealthiest of the owning class lacked electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, radio, television, electronic computers, the internet, cell phones, HDTVs, antibiotics, vaccines, generic drugs, medical imaging, DNA testing, video conferences with health care professionals, and so on. Today, don't even working people benefit from these things? So, even when your if condition holds, the claimed consequence, that such investments "either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class" seems hard to believe.)
amavect 6mo ago
Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M
- tmoertel 6mo ago
  > Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. You forgot the most important part. Let me add it for you: "Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment..., while creating a job market, [and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole]." > The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits. You cannot eat a stock certificate, nor can you use it to heal an infection, nor can you ask it to repair your refrigerator. To receive a tangible benefit such as these, you must consume a good or service. And what is the economy but a machine that produces the goods and services that the people within it consume? Therefore, it is the mix of goods and services consumed (which equals that produced) that determines how society benefits. And, as you've already admitted, a low capital gains tax incentivizes the wealthy to buy paper assets instead of luxuries for themselves. But luxuries are real goods and services, aren't they? In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
  - amavect 6mo ago

inglor_cz 6mo ago

Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-spending.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s... BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple. Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs. With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.

mmooss 6mo ago
I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses. And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data. > With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste. As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency. But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes. On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.

pseudohadamard 5mo ago

Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines. I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.