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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

Which taxes (if any) would you prefer?

The point isn't so much that people are taxed. It's that they are taxed by a monolithic out-of-control bureaucracy that has grown much to large for anyone's good. To add to this, I'd be 100% ok if my tax bill was flipped such that the federal government got what my local government had gotten and my local government got what the federal government had gotten.

I’m curious as to how you think your proposed structure would be significantly different from the structure under the Articles of Confederation. It seems as though we’ve already tried having minimal revenue raising structures for the federal government, learned that such a structure does not work well at international scales (240 years ago - we’re even more globalized now) and moved onto a more productive form of taxation.

The things we are spending money on (besides arguably defense) have next to nothing to do with working at international scale. Furthermore, while I'm not advocating we return to the era of AoC, the power granted via the current Constitution does not bestow the power, size, and scope of things that the current federal government has embraced.

Well, one thing that would simplify things and reduce the number of taxpayers that have to deal with filing returns is to simply exempt people who make less than a certain threshold, perhaps $40k. People making so little money are already struggling, so why do they need to pay taxes, and worse, spend time and money filing tax returns for that?

That's already effectively the case, though the numbers are different. If you're married and make under $24k per year, you don't pay tax. (And other credits that low-income people often are eligible for can increase that number.) It is annoying because you still have to file, and if an employer withheld anything, you have to wait until April to get it back.

I meant that it would be nice if people with low (and even middle) incomes weren't saddled with having to file a tax return. It's a huge pain point for people struggling to make ends meet.

This would probably require some simplification of the tax code.

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