291–300 of 306 posts
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Isn't that how income tax works too? Why should cap gains be different?
Income tax is based on income earned, capital gains is based on a sale of a asset. There is definitely a difference.
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If you are happy to pay for it, why do you need it to be a tax? You can pay your government directly. Unless you want other people to pay for it, of course.
That is what a tax is and how it is levied. The people in the town agreed via voting to levy the tax so that we could all collectively benefit. I am sure some people disagreed but that is democracy.
Democracy is not a justification for payment. 51% can vote to rob the other 49%.
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You're responding to a technocratic argument about how to allocate taxes equitably with a moralistic argument that taxes are good. From a meta-debate perspective this is both infuriating and tragically common. Details matter. Incentives matter. "Taxes are actually good" isn't a reason to stop caring about which taxation schemes produce the best outcomes or are more fair. "Punishment" carries some unnecessary connotat…
Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies? And like the other commenter, you seem to think a tax is a cost/disincentive which it is but there is a positive side too. Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore. In other words, the true cost may be on individua…
These are the questions the field of economics studies. Thats what they say.
> Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore.
Saying that there is a benefit of taxes is an economic argument. Thats why it gets responded with economic arguments. If you imply the act of paying taxes is moral, I would compare it to the donation to church, where self-sacrifice is a virtue of its own. Much like the donation to church, it should be for those that want it. After all, its not self-sacrifice if its not voluntary!
> In other words, the true cost may be on individual people. But so is the true benefit
The ones that pay are not the ones that receive the benefit. Under this Doctrine you could always see a robber stealing a wallet and conclude that society is not a dime poorer. After all, one side gained what the other side has lost. What a defense the criminal has! That he has not made society poorer!
> So would taxing solely corporations have more cost or benefit for those people? Both for the people in the corporations and those without? I have yet to see a coherent, let alone persuasive, argument against the idea.
Its very hard to tell , precisely because corporate taxes hit different people in different ways in a chaotic way. It is much easier to make a conclusion with different taxation methods, but corporate taxes are very obscure and distortive.
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That is what a tax is and how it is levied. The people in the town agreed via voting to levy the tax so that we could all collectively benefit. I am sure some people disagreed but that is democracy.
Do people that vote against it not get to pay for it? Democracy is not a justification for payment. 51% can vote to rob the other 49%.
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Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies? And like the other commenter, you seem to think a tax is a cost/disincentive which it is but there is a positive side too. Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore. In other words, the true cost may be on individua…
> Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies? These are the questions the field of economics studies. Thats what they say. > Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore. Saying that there is a benefit of taxes is an economic argument. Thats why it gets responde…
Again, that is factually and objectively incorrect. I even gave you a personal example where I pay and I benefit. You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
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> Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies? These are the questions the field of economics studies. Thats what they say. > Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore. Saying that there is a benefit of taxes is an economic argument. Thats why it gets responde…
> The ones that pay are not the ones that receive the benefit. Again, that is factually and objectively incorrect. I even gave you a personal example where I pay and I benefit. You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
If the latter is true, there is no need for a tax: the government can sell it optionally and every single payer would subscribe to it. The tax is only necessary to collect the money from people that would not pay for it.
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Do people that vote against it not get to pay for it? Democracy is not a justification for payment. 51% can vote to rob the other 49%.
Democracy is a justification actually. That is the point of the system. If you want a different one, good luck but so far no one has been able to beat democracy. Personally sometimes I get what I want and sometimes I don't. Democracy is a compromise.
But lets say I go down this path with you, one that is not only not how democracies work, but a reprehensible if it were. Lets put it up to a poll then. Lets vote for all these issues and see what happens. The results might surprise you. I have seldom if ever seen a vote for a tax increase to pass popular support.
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> think you and I fundamentally disagree on what a tax is. You seem to view it as punishment or a burden. I view it as the method for paying for things that help the collective good. Not a punishment but rather a duty for those with the means. If we aren't using taxes to collectively protect society (e.g. military, police, courts), help the less fortunate, etc then why collect them at all? The richer the entity (indi…
> A tax IS a punishment A tax is a legitimate cost of a functioning economy as much as an electricity bill or a truckload of cement. That tax pays for the infrastructure which makes that same transaction possible in the first place. Ideally the cost of participation in the economy should scale linearly with how much excess benefit you derive. Total benefit minus the cost of being a functioning human in the society. T…
> A tax is a legitimate cost of a functioning economy as much as an electricity bill or a truckload of cement. That tax pays for the infrastructure which makes that same transaction possible in the first place.
A tax can be used to pay for the infrastructure, and also pay many other things that are terrible and inefficient and immoral. Government spends a very small fraction of its budget on infrastructure, what about the rest? If only a fraction of the spending justifies the whole, then as long as you use some part for good you are entitled to rob the whole.
Moreover, as time progresses, we find more and more ways to pay for infrastructure without taxes. Why is the infrastructure of the US is crumbling, and tax pressure is equal or higher? Its just not real that taxes are necessary for infrastructure, and that taxes are spent on infrastructure.
> Ideally the cost of participation in the economy should scale linearly with how much excess benefit you derive. Total benefit minus the cost of being a functioning human in the society. This requires the insight that a person who has $1,000 of discretionary money every week has a lot more than ten times the excess benefit as someone who has just $100 discretionary every week.
I dont see well the justification for 'excess benefit'. What is excess benefit and who decides? For me, goverment employee salaries are excess benefit, because many of them do actual damange and collect a paycheck. Can we tax those 100%? The second part talks about the ability to pay: if someone has higher ability to pay a tax they should pay a higher tax. I dont think this is in everyones best interest either. If someone is earning a lot more because he produces more value, the tax will punish the productive fields, and prize the least productive fields. This means more people will work on the least productive, and less people on the most productive. The end result is worse wealth for the entire society.
> Put another way, from the perspective of a rich person, it's in my interest to have everyone else in society well fed, free of disease, mentally healthy and able to work productively. The best way for rich people to ensure that is to require them all to pay a much larger proportion of taxes.
It is not true that taxes are the way to help people advance. The greatest advances of human kind in quality of life and wealth happened in time of low government tax and intervention. Equating taxes to benefit is a grave mistake, one that reality has once and again shown extreme dangers. The society with the ultimate taxation, Socialist-communist, has shown greatest decline and misery of its people.
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If you pay 10% on $100,000 a year, you have 90,000 left over. Plenty of money to live comfortably and have your needs met. If you pay 10% on $20,000, you have $18,000. It was already hard to live on 20k, living on 18k and having your needs met is even harder. Your examples reveal your bias. Most people don't make $100,000. And it's the "most people" that you would impact hardest with the flat tax scheme.
If you looked at the Ted Cruz tax plan from the 2016 campaign, he advocated for a 10% tax on individuals with a high standard dedication and a 16% tax on business income. Taxpayers making under $50k would have paid zero under his plan. It is possible to do a flat tax while protecting the poor. But, as Milton Friedman said, the tax code is complex for a reason — it gives politicians a means to exert power and reward o…
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And while we all would prefer greater efficiency in government, an inefficient government is still universally preferable to an absent or non-functioning government. Also, if that inefficiency is in the form of salaries or domestic spending, it's only partly wasted as it adds to movement of money in the economy.
God no. The broken window fallacy comes back from 1830, before Bastiat. If you pay someone to do nothing you waste both the money you used that could have gone to something useful and the time of the person that would have done something else, hopefully productive, instead.