41–50 of 79 posts
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Its like the mafia coming to your door wanting a protection fee but instead the government is much bigger and even pays to punish people for wrong-think like on this site. If you don't pay your taxes and fight back, the government will send its servants to kill you or beat you until money pops out.
God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Ray Charles is God.
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You do realize as an American you have to pay US taxes whatever you live in the world so simple moving wouldn't help. You could drop your citizenship but you will need another. No country with little or no taxes will give you a citizenship. Your best bet is to stay in the US and complain to get policies changed. Or live in the woods/desert. The average person has no real path to a tax free life but the rich can use l…
Do the wealthy need the government's services, financed through taxes, as much as "the average person". What if a US citizen obtainins citizenship in a country that does not tax non-residents, relinquishes her US citizenship and then moves to a country that has little or no taxes.
If the hypothetical wealthy citizen moves to a country without functioning government infrastructure, it's a safe bet that their first priority upon landing will be to figure out a way to move their assets into instruments that are valued in dollars or euro's.
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It's a common strawman argument to paint the argument as black and white, that either you want taxes or you want zero taxes. When in reality there's many shades of grey. The majority of people that complain about taxes don't want zero taxation, they just want to be taxed fairly, with proper representation, and for the government to make proper use of the money they do take, with accountability, before demanding more…
These are things that everyone want, they don't really distinguish those who complain about taxes from those who don't. I'd propose, simplistically, that people who demand tax cuts have in common the following characteristics: - they may be confused about the role(s) of taxation - they may not have sat down with pen and paper to try and figure out how to work a government's finances - they may not be aware that a lot…
There is no evidence supporting this assertion. A massive swath of people currently support raising taxes on the wealthy solely to take their money away (“reducing income equality”) without having a particularly sound way to spend it or one that even makes mathematical sense.
https://twitter.com/iamscottenglish/status/12358062448179159...
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I think there's a non-trivial (and certainly non-zero) portion of the population who would specifically enjoy tax hikes on other people who have become, in their judgment, too successful .
Huge success is only possible in the context of systems and infrastructure that enable it. There are no billionaires in Mad Max because society has crumbled - you can't leverage an educated workforce to build your widgets or a working interstate highway system to move them around. Is it so much to ask that those that benefit the most from the legal, financial, law enforcement, and military infrastructure of a country…
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I think there's a non-trivial (and certainly non-zero) portion of the population who would specifically enjoy tax hikes on other people who have become, in their judgment, too successful .
Huge success is only possible in the context of systems and infrastructure that enable it. There are no billionaires in Mad Max because society has crumbled - you can't leverage an educated workforce to build your widgets or a working interstate highway system to move them around. Is it so much to ask that those that benefit the most from the legal, financial, law enforcement, and military infrastructure of a country…
They already contribute more than proportionally. Proportionally is a flat tax rate and the rich already contribute far in excess of that.
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I think there's a non-trivial (and certainly non-zero) portion of the population who would specifically enjoy tax hikes on other people who have become, in their judgment, too successful .
Huge success is only possible in the context of systems and infrastructure that enable it. There are no billionaires in Mad Max because society has crumbled - you can't leverage an educated workforce to build your widgets or a working interstate highway system to move them around. Is it so much to ask that those that benefit the most from the legal, financial, law enforcement, and military infrastructure of a country…
We could pull the plug on that system, but only by driving ourselves into utter poverty, so in some sense we are hostages of the system that we created. On the other hand, if that system fails to serve an agreeable social purpose, it's our prerogative to moderate it.
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Those countries all have various forms of (non-income) taxation.
Could you please elaborate a bit? Because on the surface it looks like USA also has non-income taxation, such as sales tax (in lieu of VAT), property tax and so on.
Also, taxes are money. Essentially, a government issues money to its (armed) servants. It also demands its citizens to pay a certain tax in form of that money. This forces the citizens to work for and sell to the government's servants to obtain that money. Servants are happy, government can continue to govern, citizens, well, who cares, right?
I learned this theory from David Graeber's Debt . You are a ruler with an army. That army has to be fed. It can just violently take what it needs from the population. But that is disorderly and makes people mad at you. So, instead, you issue money to the soldiers. By why would the population take this money in exchange for food? Even if it's made out of a precious metal, what does a peasant want with gold, when nobod…
Certainly the peasants also need to trade with each other, regardless of the presence of an army? Money facilitates that trade. You can barter chickens or goats or whatever but at some point nobody needs more of those either. Especially because chickens have to be fed.
When the thing being traded has only abstract value it becomes money, even if the tokens are chickens.
I think an argument could be made that armies are just a jobs program. In a way money necessities jobs because of the increased economic capabilities of that abstract trade token. With more efficient trade the peasants have less to do so they need ever more complex jobs. An army (and the military-industrial complex) provide those jobs.
david cay johnston on the moral basis of progressive taxation (3 min) https://youtu.be/8Qsl6QUlWVc