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Comment by geysersam | Hacker News Reader

> The counterpoint is that this leaves money invested, which means others invest in other things,

This is a bad argument. Taxes are also money invested, in schooling, infrastructure, etc.

It's a very common fallacy of people criticizing public spending to point to the stock market and say "Look! Imagine how rich we would be if we had just invested the public spending instead." Completely falling into the trap of discarding the value growth of public investments just because they are not measured and advertised the same way.

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Both arguments are bad, in that they are both based on the best use of money that isn't yours to use.

Saying "this person's money most benefits me if I let them keep it" vs "this person's money most benefits me if it's redistributed to me" are just two frames that reveal your belief in your entitlement to others property and labor based on your belief of it's benefit to you.

> Taxes are also money invested, in schooling, infrastructure, etc.

Not presently. Most tax dollars are spent elsewhere and infrastructure/education get less than 7%: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Even that spending is not effective. Drive California roads and you’ll often see fixes that aren’t much better than the damaged roads they replaced. And let’s not talk about our wonderful train projects…

In theory, this money would make a lot of difference. In practice, it’s heartbreaking.

It's invested. In infrastructure, schooling, endless wars on foreign soil, etc. You not agreeing with the quality of the investment is a separate issue. You probably don't agree with every investment in the private sector either.

Infra in CA is not going so well. Roads as an example are terrible compared to most developed countries. When last years winter storms damaged many roads, the newly paved replacements are not very smooth at all and some have been redone multiple times in the span of a single year. I don’t know what the causes are, but when comparing to EU where they have to account for freezing temps, CA doesn’t seem THAT complicated. Yet EU highways on average are a lot better.

Most tax dollars go to social security, health (including medicare) interest and defence.

So on the one hand, very little of that is infrastructure. Mostly it seems to go on "keeping people alive".

Now sure, the govt could invest the money instead, and let a bunch of (mostly old) people die.

In our "money" equation, old people have little practical value (and there's no line in our fiscal analysis for measuring our humanity).

Which perhaps is why it's best not to evaluate returns on govt spending the way you would measure returns on personal investments.

[As a PS I'd add that all those taxes, flowing back to the old people, is flowing back into the economy, which is what keeps businesses in business, and keeps those share prices going up.]

Nevertheless, welfare for olds is in no way an investment when those same individuals have reached the end of their productive years and have a decade or two to live. The point was that calling taxes "an investment" is largely untrue when most tax dollars don't go to anything of the sort.

Social security and medicare are not means-tested in any way whatsoever. In fact, they are massive welfare programs that make our budget structurally unsustainable to give money to the demographic that has had the most time to build up wealth and assets. Around one-third of all US wealth is held by Americans over seventy years old. Perhaps instead of an estate tax, we should explore having those well-off seniors use their savings and home equity instead of demanding government funds. Not to mention decades of subsidizing housing demand has drastically inflated housing prices, and younger Americans are now paying many of these retirees several times what those properties went for decades ago, an increase well in excess of inflation. In other words, through multiple channels, the young are being sucked dry by the old, despite the fact that the old hold a huge chunk of wealth.

I'd also point out old people are a terrible way to feed money back into the economy. They are generally the last people to adopt any innovation outside medicine, so increasing their share of spending draws dollars away from new innovation and towards constructing bingo halls. That has a caustic effect on our long-term economic outlook.

There will of course be the poor grandmother whom we don't want eating dog food. I doubt anyone disagrees with you on that. Let's just not pretend all of them need the checks they presently receive.

Social security, specifically is a mostly or was mostly a way to force retirement preparation on the masses who decided they didn't want or know how to before this. Most wealth is now held by middle aged people in the US actually, housing issues isn't even caused by old people but by multinational banking/holding corporations like BlackRock and its like.

What are you doing to change this? Are you trying to make the situation better? California has been run into the ground for the last thirty years intentionally. Many residents love having mentally ill people die in the streets. They have created an entire system to support this. Money has been drained away from roads and schools to pay for ever growing "programs" to employ rich white ladies so they can brag to their friends about their incredible virtue.

You are free to leave. There are plenty of low-tax countries. If you want to live in the US, Europe, Japan,..., then you must pay to be part of our reindeer games.

That said, PLEASE get involved and try to direct public funding and attention towards core activities (roads, schools, infrastructure) instead of ever more ridiculous programs to employ Berkeley graduates in virtuous-looking jobs. Utah does a great job at this sort of thing. Instead of learning from them, our political elite degrade them and insult them for their religious beliefs. I once repeated a colleague's obscene jokes, only I stated that he said them about Muslims instead of Mormons. He lost his mind trying to correct me. It was amusing.

From your reply you haven’t actually lived in either Europe or Japan. They generally do not have people die on the streets and you enjoy some excellent infrastructure. It would be nothing short of amazing to get half the services or protections people in other developed countries take for granted.

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