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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

I'm always dismayed here and elsewhere to see everyone assuming that collection is the problem, not the dispensing and management. If someone proves incapable of proper budgeting, surely it is foolish to want them to have more money? Always sad that it's everyone but the policy and budget makers being blamed for the failures of policy and budget making. You can argue an honest politician can't survive, but you shouldn't shift blame.

It seems like some feel it's a catch 22, that citizens don't want to pay for things yet they want things. But in reality, those clamoring for the improvements and government assistance are rarely those that don't want to pay and/or recognize government fallacies wrt spending. If you want to tackle the problems, you need to first be honest with where they lie...and not having enough money is not where the problems lie.

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I agree that it's largely a crisis of leadership. Both major parties are to blame. Kicking the can down the road, so to speak, has proved politically rewarding. I think that we, as a people, need to stop thinking that taxation is inherently bad. Taxation with incompetent governance is inherently bad. Taxation with little in return is bad. But taxation itself is not bad. Nor are we overtaxed in absolute terms. We are overtaxed in terms of return from government.

I certainly don't advocate throwing money at the situation. I advocate that as a nation we take a step back on reassess what our views on government are. We've largely bought into the false beliefs that government is always incompetent, government regulation is inherently bad, and taxation is bad. I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in. These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.

> I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in.

Gotta start at the top. Transparency and clarity of spending coupled with simplification of the tax code. In the meantime, deference to smaller regions can help (but not on everything) where accountability is more real.

> These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.

Nah, apathy wins in these situations where boats are not rocked significantly on either side.

As someone who supports higher taxation, I've come around to the idea that liberals and conservatives are largely talking past each other on this point. Yes, our taxes are too low (if we want to have the kind of welfare state Sweden or Germany have). Yes, our public sector is particularly inefficient, compared to Sweden or Germany (or France or Canada).

In my experience your average voter who opposes higher taxes isn't a Randian. Rather, they feel like they're not getting enough in return for what they pay in taxes. (And when you look at data about how we spend more to get less in education, transit, etc., turns out they're right!)

> our taxes are too low [...] our public sector is particularly inefficient

Right. You cannot begin fixing the first problem in a democracy until you begin fixing the second. The solutions cannot happen in parallel either. So we either need to better prioritize our complaints or accept that attempts to fix the first problem is often just flushing people's money that they may need. Perfection is not a requirement, just some level of mediocrity could be enough to restore some trust.

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