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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> they have all the wealth to make it happen

Contrary to popular opinion, money doesn't automatically buy votes. Tax is a popular issue. This isn't like changing some minor regulation nobody has ever heard about. You can't bury the changes being advocated. And all the money in the world won't buy off every Grover Norquist from primarying Republicans who dare to raise taxes, however narrowly constrained.

This PR expands the Overton window around new tax rates at higher tiers, and that's good. It also helps defang the Grover Norquists by undermining their popular support.

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Yes, and I am advocating that if the wealthiest desire to change the overton window around taxes there's plenty of other ways to do this on top of the op-ed for which I don't personally see evidence of happening (if I'm wrong please let me know). It's not difficult to buy up local newspapers in red states. It may be much more difficult to challenge Fox News, but we already have VC-unicorns for various stupid apps that're advertised far and wide. It should be possible to VC-startup a 'conservative' media, bribe mainstream fox news reporters to break contract to get on the 'conservative' media, and force them to become millionare mouthpieces of progressive billionaires with a major advertising campaign.

The reason why we have such strong anti-tax now can be partially attributed to a highly successful creating of one's own audience through careful information feeding, powered by wealth, through multiple channels. Therefore, I don't see reason why the progressive wealthy cannot do the same manipulative tactics for their own purposes.

If you had the rule: "If you have money coming in, ten percent of it belongs to the government. No messing. No exceptions. No loopholes. Ten percent for everyone for everything."

Would that increase or decrease the amount of taxes?

The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me.

> The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me

It shouldn't trouble you. Consider "if you have money coming in." What's "money coming in?" You could tax money transfers, but then my sending $10 from BofA to Citi would invoke a tax. Okay, so if the person on both accounts is the same no tax. Fine. What if some sends $10 from a sole account to a joint account? What if it's from a natural person to their single-member LLC? Et cetera, et cetera.

Broadly speaking, federal income taxes take down about 10% of GDP and payroll taxes a further 6% [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

> The fact that I can't even answer that simple question troubles me.

Well, we don't (AFAIK) know the total amount of non-GDP transfers of wealth that occur. If you limit taxed transactions to just the transactions that show up in GDP, then it's equivalent to asking what the current tax-to-GDP ratio is, which is easy to look up (it's much higher than 10%.)

The reason the message "All taxes are bad" resonates so well is because there has been a near constant cadence accompanying it that "All government is bad". Many people think there is no inherent value in government because that has been sold to them for the past 50+ years.

It is similar to the message that "Adam Smith's capitalism" = "no regulations" when in fact Adam Smith was not against regulations. Regulations are the structure that markets are built upon. Otherwise, everything is caveat emptor (translation: let the buyer beware) all the time.

It is hard to know where the correct line between total freedom and total government control lies, but I have to assume it is somewhere closer to the middle than either extreme, but the middle never makes the evening news.

> Many people think there is no inherent value in government because that has been sold to them for the past 50+ years.

I think most Americans' experience with government is bad. Especially with taxes--they won't even tell you what you owe them. Often the electronic systems are just broken (Illinois' form a couple years back required a driver's license to submit payment, but the field only accepted 8 digits while IL DL numbers are 12 digits long). I personally don't have a problem with tax or government if there's a sane value proposition.

No. Most Americans have no idea when they are interacting with government.

Safe water, safe food, safe(ish) drugs, roads, less air pollution, the mail, airplanes that fly safely, cars that are safe, fuel efficiency in cars, and thousands of other things are all generally good interactions with government that most people don’t attribute to government.

Yes, going to the DMV sucks. Doing your taxes is annoying. Thats about all most people think about when they say the government is bad.

Because none of those things are done by governments. They're done by companies that provide water, food, medicine, airplanes, cars etc.

Governments mostly just insist that good results happen, and can easily cause problems doing even that. Meanwhile other things run directly by governments do have a long track record of being worse than the private sector equivalents, and taxpayer interactions is clearly an important component of that.

> Because none of those things are done by governments. They're done by companies that provide water, food, medicine, airplanes, cars etc.

Before the US federal government forced companies to act the country's polluted rivers caught fire repeated. The pollution that caused those rivers to catch fire didn't stop because of those companies' own will or because of the market's influence. The government needed to intervene, otherwise the pollution and fires would have continued.

> Governments mostly just insist that good results happen, and can easily cause problems doing even that. Meanwhile other things run directly by governments do have a long track record of being worse than the private sector equivalents, and taxpayer interactions is clearly an important component of that.

This is political dogma and not fact.

Services provided by governments optimize for vastly different outcomes than the private sector. It also seems that many people harshly judge government services while they ignore real problem that occur when those services are privatized.

> Services provided by governments optimize for vastly different outcomes than the private sector. It also seems that many people harshly judge government services while they ignore real problem that occur when those services are privatized.

I'm not the parent but I started this subthread. I didn't bring this topic up to advocate for privatization; I brought it up to note that advocates for more/bigger government might enjoy more political support if they focused on improving government ROI. Lots of countries have competent governments; I'm certainly sympathetic to those who think we should improve the efficiency of our government before we raise taxes.

I came across this sentence today on a page for a public swimming pool. "Recent ADA changes have required the installation of entry steps and a power lift." [0] It reminded me of this thread.

Most of the value in government is setting standards so that society is more fair to those that have been ignored in the past. It struck me as odd in how they phrased this sentence. Now, I have to admit that the person that wrote the copy for this page has some kind of fetish for sharing building footprint measurements, but not height. So, I don't think copy editing is high on their list of skills.

The federal government was actually designed to be pretty inefficient in order to keep it small and out of people's hair. Government wasn't supposed to be good at making roads. It was supposed to be good at saying how wide those interstate highway lanes should be.

Don't even get me started on federal contract law and the FAR. I think it says somewhere around page 1312 in the FAR that government contracting should be as efficient as possible.

[0] https://www.bristoltn.org/202/Haynesfield-Aquatic-Center

You're right that people only notice the things that don't work well, but I think it's a lot more than going to the DMV and taxes. Road construction that cones-off 2 lanes out of 3 for 40 miles and 6 months while there's about a week of actual construction. Tollway systems that forbid you from knowing what toll you missed or how much you owe until after the "late payment" period. Nepotism and other kinds of government corruption. Extortionist property assessment practices. The broken/unusable/inaccurate state of most government websites. Insane turnaround times for construction permits. Pointless building restrictions. High fees for almost every interaction. Extortionist traffic violation practices. Terrible appeals processes. Abusive, rude bureaucrats. Broken or delapidated infrastructure. These are experiences I've had or observed in the last few years.

I don't have these experiences when I deal with the private sector, and those dealings are also quite a lot cheaper than with the public sector.

This isn't to say that privatization is the answer or the only answer; I've had really good experiences with the governments of other countries and even in the US, value varies across agencies.

> ... I don't have these experiences when I deal with the private sector, and those dealings are also quite a lot cheaper than with the public sector. ...

You are aware that much of what you just described, road construction, government websites, and many forms of traffic enforcement, is handled by private sector contractors?

Who do you suppose hired those contractors? Why does the government have worse luck than the private sector when it comes to hiring competent contractors? Why is there a meme among contractors about how easy it is to overcharge the public sector? I voted for Obama, but his administration owns the disasterous rollout of healthcare.gov.

"Otherwise, everything is caveat emptor"

Does it even reach that level?

Buyer implies contract -> contract law -> rule of law -> government.

And caveat emptor is a legal concept which again reinforces the above.

What's the Latin for 'Trade and hope the other guy doesn't have a bigger weapon'?

Closest I can think of is "Si vis pacem, para bellum" ;)

Or the Roosevelt quote.

Anyway, killing traders or customers is a good way to get out of business. (Only if there's enough "suckers" or your product is irreplaceable can you ever consider it. Such as with certain drugs.)

All that is good, but are the doing it regardless of how hard it is? Seems that almost none of them are.

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