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Comment by _ah | Hacker News Reader

This very common trope always annoys me. "There is so much money flowing through the economy, and I just need to get a little bit for {insert cause}".

No.

Money does not flow like water through pipes, and you cannot just siphon some off without affecting the whole. Dollars are packets... each one is addressed to a particular destination, and sent to accomplish a specific purpose. If we want money for {cause}, we must choose to address dollars to that cause to the exclusion of other purposes.

/rant

(I know that melling specifically mentioned giving up bottled water, but there has to be a compelling reason to do so that EVERY dollar/packet sender agrees on.)

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This is basically anti-tax rhetoric. I don't think there's a single thing in the world that everyone would willfully agree to spend their money on. Which is kind of why taxes exist in the first place.

I have always thought it was weird when people get possessive about their tax money. As in, that's my money you're spending!

It isn't yours, because however mandatory it was you paid it to them, and when you give it it ceases to be yours. At any rate even the richest among us are making comparatively miniscule contributions in the scheme of things.

There are plenty of things the government does that I like, and I would sure like to pay for those ahead of say, funding for wars I don't like or finding new and indirect ways of killing people (by this I mean military spending), but I pay my taxes with the understanding that this is all part of the deal.

>>It isn't yours, because however mandatory it was you paid it to them, and when you give it it ceases to be yours.

It's more than that.

Tax money was never yours to begin with. You owed it to the government by default. The government just allowed it to touch your bank account temporarily before collecting it.

No. If you live in a democracy then the tax money is yours. You are the government. You have every right to complain about what they are doing with your money.

And this complaint is called an "election". Seems to me like getting super possessive about what the elected people do without a proposed solution (elect somebody else, run for office, etc.) is nonproductive and fails to grasp some essential point about the whole thing.

Seems to me like complaining about some types of spending would be a good way to garner support and win an election, if enough people agree with you. But maybe that's just me.

I don't think anyone is arguing you don't have the right to complain about where tax dollars go. They're arguing against the idea that taxation is theft, and the government doesn't have the right to collect it.

Isn't 'they' 'you' then?

Before asking for more of the money spend freely you should stop and ask your elected officials to not spend the money so recklessly.

millions, if not billions, are wasted every day by politicians propping up their political power yet by some miracle if we just took more money they could spend it more wisely.

if is the near impunity and preponderance of so many taxes that has led us into a situation with untold wealth in government hands and near financial accountability for a good portion of it.

Many love to lambast Federal spending but you would be aghast at how much of county, city, and state, funding is now going to pay. California, thirty thousand plus retirees pulling down 100k, nineteen thousand in Illinois. All justified because they were paid a lot working for the government. Twenty billion per year in retirement just from CalPers, twelve billion in Illinois. That is pension numbers, not active employees, which far outnumber them!

anti-tax rhetoric exist because politicians use the public money to grant largess to insured voting bases, the very people working in their jurisdictions and trying to FUD you in going along with it.

"Of course, if only we'd thought of that! All that waste we waste, we could just stop wasting it!"

https://youtu.be/Zoz5EuIF_y8

What about the Great Recession happening because of the lack of credit availability?

Is that a lecture about opportunity cost?

Consumers can vote with their dollars. I’m not sure why you don’t think we can’t channel money in various ways. A lot of money has gone into AID’s research, for example, and a lot of progress has been made.

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