If this seems radical, notice that this is already part of the American social contract. We already tax people to provide services and invest in long term projects. All this does is change the rates and the allocation direction.
Ok, well here is a department of the government I am familiar with admitting they waste $25-30 billion every year (imo that is an underestimate, but they definitely waste over 50% of their funding on worthless stuff): https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2016/07_01_2016/story3...
So why not reallocate that to whatever this climate project is? And I'm sure there is similar massive waste in other departments too. If 87.5% is representative that is $3.5 trillion per year to be used.
I mean no one actually wants to waste ~$30 billion a year on worthless medical research, right?
This reminds me of the Wanamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.
Once you know the common problems, it is actually quite easy to spot design flaws or a history of hiding unwanted results. When you know what to look for you can filter out crappy research in a few seconds. It could probably be automated to a large extent.
For example, a common thing in biomed is to have a "headline claim" that x protein/drug/etc influences y behavior/health outcome/etc. But then there is never a scatterplot of x vs y.
Another is lack of "blinding" (hiding the experimental conditions from the researcher/subjects). There are more, but you get the picture. The presence of these baffling practices quickly demonstrates they don't know what they are doing, and the research should not be funded.
That simplistic logic fails to account for the fact that pursuing income is an incentive to allocate resources to productive investments that are self-sufficient and pay off tons of taxes directly and indirextly, such as by paying salaries and generating demand.
Once you start to impose communist "reallocation mechanisms", not only are you eliminating incentives for productive investments as they effectively cease to be productive due to state intervention and actually create incentives to move production and industrial capabilities out of the country.
In short, you're advocating that the goose that lays golden eggs should be slautered to get to someone else's eggs.
You mean, like a heirarchy of preferential tax rates for different income sources where capital income is favored over general income which in turn is favored over labor income?
In a free and democratic society, a citizen has the right to the fruit of his labour, not just to a small fraction of what he worked for.
> Robbing someone of 70% of their income is way more aggravating and profoundly totalitarian than a simple progressive tax.
A 70% top marginal rate isn't taxing (much less “robbing”) 70% of your income, unless your income is literally infinite.
Also, the top marginal rate was at or above 70% for every year from 1936 through 1980, yet for some reason those 44 years aren't usually considered a “profoundly totalitarian” period in US history.