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Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

I’m not convinced taxation will reduce wealth inequality. My own city spends a fortune annually on fighting homelessness. It’s now just a bloated government and homeless industrial complex that exists to “solve” homelessness, but they have no incentive to do anything about the problem because they’d work themselves out of a job.

But going to my main point - your argument is predicted on a belief that more taxes will solve problems. I think we disagree insofar as the government is competent or even really cares to solve important issues.

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And I'll add that many people are less likely to support increased taxes if they think it's being wasted or used for things that go against their ideals. The more divided the country is, the more this becomes a prominent part.

Taxes fund schools, universities, fire and police departments, public health measures, and plenty of other things that make life more livable -- and with greater potential -- for the poor. Without taxes, only the wealthy would have access to health, education, and safety.

In your example the government is dropping the ball on solving the homeless problem. But I'd rather live in a world where at least my government tries to solve problems, rather than one where it says, "well, we can't do a perfect job, so we might as well do nothing."

I'm also pretty unconvinced that

> they have no incentive to do anything about the problem because they’d work themselves out of a job.

since it's their job to do something about the problem. I'm plenty cynical about the US, but even I find it hard to reason that everyone here is just sitting on their hands and collecting their paychecks instead of actually trying to do a job that basically everyone (homeless, housed, and politicians) wants done.

> In your example the government is dropping the ball on solving the homeless problem. But I'd rather live in a world where at least my government tries to solve problems, rather than one where it says, "well, we can't do a perfect job, so we might as well do nothing."

The homelessness call out was meant to be an example. It’s not the only inefficiency. My own city has had more and more innovative taxes - on both businesses, and on individuals. As a tax payer, taxes are increasing for me, yet I don’t see any meaningful improvement. And I’m not talking about a 6 month or 2 year timespan but 10-15 years. In the same time, the government apparatus has gotten larger and larger. There are more ways the government has found to extract revenue from workers. But what are we getting in return? Our public schools aren’t great. Teacher salaries are a joke.

Bridges and roads require maintenance, but these contracts seemingly go to specific bidders who are on a revolving door - they deliver such a low standard service that we’re doing the same repairs a year later.

There’s a mixture of corruption and incompetence. But the government has unlimited authority to increase taxes, giving the appearance they’re doing so to help the less fortunate. In reality, it’s basically an industry of jobs that doesn’t have to compete. If they had to compete, they would have failed as a business a very long time ago.

Would you mind saying what city you're talking about? It's a bit alarming that a city could be steadily increasing tax rates while offering almost nothing in return.

"Taxes fund schools, universities, fire and police departments, public health measures, and plenty of other things that make life more livable" emphasis mine

It seems this premise is debatable and subject to variable weight depending on how much value an individual sees in those institutions, and more importantly what that money is actually spent on.

I think there can absolutely be incompetent governments, like say an idiot country that puts a game show host in office.

What is the threshold for a government to be incompetent? It seems the government operations and day to day activities change very little based on the president.

In the USA we're just predisposed to elect bad people, a significant segment of the voting public think electing a game show host is a good move, this sort of voting population will have effects at all levels.

Some of that is dictated at a system level. Because states have different primary dates, many states are left with limited, if any, choice for who to put on the general ballot because so many drop out. The voter turn out for primaries is abysmal, so it could be considered "significant" depending on how you want to look at it, but the percentage number could be as low as single digits out of the overall population.

Then you have the game mentality that you have to pick the candidate with the most chance of winning that still shares some of your views, or that the polling shows your higher pick will lose. Ranked choice could really help here.

By the time you get to the general election it's basically a choice between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread.

I don't disagree. I will add that the "system level" is itself legislated by elected officials. Its an interesting thing, like a series of games where the winner gets to redefine rules for the next match in the series. At some point the game can become rigged.

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