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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe I am able to pay enough to make a difference.

I believe that if all people of my income paid more, we could make a difference.

I support all people of my income, including me, paying more taxes and opposed me alone paying more taxes.

The evidence you've provided does not provide significant support to your conclusion.

Here's what WOULD support your conclusion: If given the choice between someone who would increase taxes for people of my income or keeping them the same/lower (ceteris paribus), I voted for the latter. If I'm voting for the former, that straight up contradicts your position.

Guess how I vote. Guess how the author votes.

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I think your point support theirs, actually.

You don't want to pay more in taxes -- you don't believe it would make a difference, despite knowing how numbers work, and knowing that it literally would. I suspect you mean that the marginal difference for the government doesn't justify the loss for you.

That's fair, but it's exactly GP's point: you don't want to pay more taxes, because you don't care when there's no reward for you personally; instead, you want millions of people to pay more taxes for your benefit.

If I alone pay more taxes, I do not see enough benefit to justify the cost.

If all people pay more taxes, a large majority of us will see a net benefit that outweighs our own cost.

I support raising taxes for everyone, including myself. This should not be a difficult concept to understand.

It's actually very difficult to understand because it seems nonsensical on the face of it. If people paying more taxes is a net good, then certainly any amount of additional taxes collected would be a net good.

Are you suggesting that there's a magic threshold that needs to be crossed where individual contributions amount to more than the sum of their parts? If so, what is it, and why does it exist? And why does that threshold always seem to be conveniently too high for people who claim they want to contribute more?

Since we're on HN, I'll give you an example of a pretty successful startup built on those "magic thresholds": Kickstarter.

Yes, of course having more money scales the ROI superlinearly. Lots of projects can't be done at all without a minimum investment. Others just have economies of scale (e.g. dilution of fixed overhead).

And considering that the government usually does stuff on very large scales, it's not strange that a single taxpayer's contribution is too small to be meaningful. Just creating a government program probably takes more than what I pay yearly.

The government is not in the position of a “kickstarter”. It has tons of revenue already, so your point doesn’t make sense.

Paying more personal taxes voluntarily is a net loss to me personally. Everyone in my income band paying more tax is the same absolute loss in income, but the net loss is substantially reduced due to the additional governmental funds, perhaps even becoming a net gain.

Clearly there are returns to scale that you can't have if you are alone in paying.

No, I'd say they want millions of people to pay more taxes (including themselves) for everyone's benefit. The comparison is between an account that a few people can contribute to and not make a significant difference, vs everyone agreeing to raise tax rates and therefore have more common wealth.

Society benefits from taxes being spent on amenities, healthcare, education, police, when less taxes are spent everyone benefits less.

> You don't want to pay more in taxes -- you don't believe it would make a difference, despite knowing how numbers work, and knowing that it literally would. I suspect you mean that the marginal difference for the government doesn't justify the loss for you.

That's exactly how numbers work. Marginal increase of income from a single taxpayer is worthless to the government in isolation, and has zero impact for anyone. Hell, it's probably of strictly negative value if someone has to create a special account and procedures just for you.

Consider this as an illustrative example: if you were to suddenly start paying 2x the taxes you used to, literally nothing the government provides would change for you, or for anyone else for that matter. But if the entire country suddenly started paying 2x the taxes, you could expect much increased quantity and quality of public services.

Just like many private enterprises, government services too tend to have a lot of fixed costs, low marginal costs, and non-uniform access patterns.

>I don't believe I am able to pay enough to make a difference.

I donate money and goods to a couple, carefully selected, charities every year. Having volunteered for them on a couple of occasions, I can definitely tell you my relatively modest help DID make a big difference to at least a few families.

I am not forcing anyone else to be charitable, yet there are many people who give (much more than I do).

There are two problems with your thinking:

- the return on our taxes paid in the USA is very, very low - we pay only a bit less in taxes then people in Europe, yet the infrastructure is crumbling, there are lots of desolate/mentally ill people in the streets, etc.

- you seem to want to FORCE people to pay more tax for your noble causes. Guess what - not everyone will agree with you what they are. That's why taxes should be limited to defense, law enforcement, public infrastructure, standardization, etc.

I think this partly comes down to what country you live in - If I lived in a Scandinavian country where it seems like people get pretty good value for their tax dollars I would be ok with paying a higher tax rate. If I lived in the USA where tax dollars are wasted on wars in the Middle East and building useless walls I would want to pay as little as possible.

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