My tax rate in NYC was something like 36% (not counting student loan payments and healthcare premiums), but where was this money going? We're paying practically the same tax rate as countries with universal healthcare, free/affordable universities, and strong safety nets, but we have none of the above. In my 5 years in NYC I saw the subway get progressively worse every year, while the homeless population exploded. I felt like that money might as well be getting flushed down the toilet.
If I could more tangibly see where that money is going, then I'd probably feel differently. I think taxpayers should have some agency in choosing where their taxpayer money goes. Andrew Yang proposed something like this, and I love the idea:
> "Each American should be able to direct 1% of their taxes to a specific project. During Revenue Day, these projects will be highlighted, showing what, exactly, America’s money was able to accomplish during the previous year. Initial profiles of the next year’s projects will also be announced so people can get excited for them." [1]
I wouldn't mind paying taxes in the U.S. if I felt like they were being productively used. It's hard to feel that way.
1. it has too much government 'civil service' ?
2. or too much private and corporate emasculation of effective government?
ie the very sentiments you echo are directly supporting the agenda of 2 and not 1.
I'm not sure if you knew where the money was going you'd feel much better about it.
For one, it's not necessarily about inefficiency, but that is part of it. For all the hate for the NHS (foreign, that is, most of the UK apparently feels love), the UK spends about $171B (USD) to provide healthcare for 66 million people. The Federal government here spends $600B to provide healthcare for 44 million people (via Medicare). It's not the same population of course -- Medicare is heavily involved in end-of-life care. But then if you include even just federal spending on Medicaid, you end up with $1T spent to provide care to 110 million people. At UK spending rates, $1T could provide medical care for the whole US population. Yes, if we had the same healthcare spending profile as the UK's NHS, we could provide healthcare for all, pay no more than we do now in taxes, and meanwhile eliminate private insurers and the hefty premiums individuals and their employers currently pay today.
But the main thing that separates us from our HDI neighbors is military spending. The USA allocates $600-800B/year to the DoD and VA (healthcare for vets). By some measures the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost nearly $7T. I'm not here to argue about the value of wars, but it's pretty clear that the primary focus of American conflict in the Middle East is oil. I'm not making a claim one way or the other that the USA is going to war just for oil, but it's also pretty clear that if the world were not purchasing ungodly amounts of the stuff pumped from the desert, the folks the US armed forces have been fighting would not have the kind of resources they do, and I'm pretty sure these wars would have cost much less -- if they'd happened at all.
That seems like a huge tangent, except that the $7T the US spent fighting oil-funded adversaries literally could today buy every driving-age American a Tesla Model 3. We could have eliminated almost 50% of domestic oil consumption, and perhaps shifted the world's power structure in a way that better serves what the DoD probably considers American interests, compared with the unending wars we currently have.
Would that have been better? Maybe we'll do it next time.
Despite one of the highest fees in the country, my DMV took 4 months to transfer a vehicle registration.
At one point I spoke to an employee who told me they needed to go find the the appropriate microfiche to print the next form needed to continue processing.
At least hackers cannot delete it :-)
Not that the amount of taxes paid ever stopped a government from trying borrow and spend way more than that.
Government, taxes, and private industry are all tools of civilization. Tools are imperfect and the human managers & users are imperfect. One has to monitor all of them to keep them in decent working order. They won't just automatically run in an optimum mode if citizens don't keep a critical eye on them all.
The only things a government can run out of are faith in the future and internal and external trust. When either or both of those disappear, human animals panic and the economy stops working.
Private enclosure of capital - which is equivalent to private enclosure of political and economic power - is far more likely to create that sort of breakdown than high taxes and generous public spending. (Effective - non-corrupt - public spending being equivalent to policy decisions that broaden and diffuse political power rather than concentrating it.)
Effective generous public spending is actually a political negative feedback mechanism that damps wild oscillations in confidence, seeds future investment, and enhances political stability.
Laws are the same way: members of civilization have to mutually agree on how to create and follow the laws for them to "work".
Civilization is the Mother of All Handshakes. If a large enough percentage of the population disagrees with the "agreements", anarchy happens.
Modern technology and civilization are both inherently driven by standards: both written and de-facto.
Governments frequently consume more resources than they can purchase with the taxes they collect.
Yes, they could just print all the money they could ever need. And when they do, inflation runs wild. Then a government cannot borrow in its own currency because no one will trust it. Or it must pay a high rate.
The US government is in a unique situation. It's been able to print much more than a government normally could because it is the most trusted reserve currency in a rapidly globalizing world. Trillions of dollars are held overseas. And if the dollar loses that role, you will see a lot of inflation as those dollars return to the US. Even if it doesn't lose that role and the world just stops taking additional dollars, the US would have to print less to keep the same rate of inflation.
Most governments don't fall into this category. And no country is in this category forever.
A country's currency is really just another form of debt. And while it may never run out, the more it prints, the more it declines in value. It's not debt people can collect on, but the law of supply and demand will certainly collect on this debt.
And it's also a tax, a tax on savings. And the country could remove dollars from circulation, thereby reducing this debt and reversing the decline in the value of savings.
Hating on the general concept of taxes isn't very productive but people are quite unhappy about the details. Politics involves painful compromises and tax is one of the pointy ends of politics.
I'd hazard that taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose - because otherwise presumably said taxpayer would already be paying for the service.
Sorry, the first half of your sentence is too broad for the rest of it to possibly be true.
Logically speaking, the assertion that 50%+ of taxes are driven by the same motivation seems impossible. Taxation is such a generic mechanism at work in so many different places, your assertion seems like a non-starter to me.
Did you intend to make such a strong claim?
The intent was quite different, I didn't see a reading of that sentence that involved motivation but now that it has been pointed out I can see that it is the most obvious one. My intent was more about the outcomes of a tax but that wasn't expressed.
What I wanted to say was something more like "No political decision has perfect support, and many cause stark divisions. But taxpayers financially support all the decisions taken and they will be vehemently opposed to some of the things they fund".
All of the competency arguments aside, this smacks of a "the free market will solve it" argument. These arguments are tiresome because the one example raised for the best evidence of this is the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
People don't generally pay for things that are in their core competencies. A very common reason to pay someone else to do something is because the person with money doesn't know how to get the result they want.
> the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
You might want to pass that on to the migrants of the world. Judging by total migration the United States are possibly most attractive destination available. Its migration intake isn't shabby when looked at as a rate either. That dumpster fire is a powerful attractor.
And even then you've missed the argument. I didn't say taxes were a bad thing. I said that people often have very strong principled objections to what their taxes are used for.
> taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose
This is wrong, because they are raised to support a country and most of that (hence the "usual" qualifier) is to support things people might not know they need. Your response to this is apparently that people do pay for things they don't know they need (or don't understand are necessary), but you fail to tell the reader why. Instead you reiterate that you are convinced they'll definitely pay for them.
That point isn't reasonable. There can't be a division where people know what they want when they vote but not when they spend money. I suppose there could be in theory, but a system that encourages that that would generally be called 'corrupt government' and the actors involved 'lying politicians' where the people who get voted in do things that the individual voters vehemently oppose.
Voting someone in to office is a broadly similar decision to going out and buying something. Individuals in their capacity as voters are not that different from individuals in their capacity as buyers.
This tends to happen because the owners are usually a relatively small group of people or an individual, and their individual personalities and changing goals will shape the quality of job they do. They may decide on a whim, "I'll milk out my fortune now and dump the problem on the public."
Where privatisation does fix things, it's usually simply because the process of privatisation gives somebody the political capital to implement massive organizational change, and that somebody happened to be the right person for it.
Conversely, when privatised infrastructure is a mess, it can be beneficial to have it taken over by the state. Again, the mere fact of doing so will give somebody the political capital to implement massive changes, which can fix things if that somebody happens to be the right person (or group of persons) for the job.
As a corollary, it would be possible to fix many "broken" state-run offices by enabling the right person(s) to implement massive changes. That's probably even preferable to privatisation in many cases: you still have the same risk that you didn't choose the right person for the job, but you eliminate the risk of them just cashing out.