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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

There's an even simpler reason to be skeptical: They're complicated, and people don't understand complicated things, so they'll never happen.

Most people don't even correctly understand how progressive taxation works, so anything more complicated than that is dead on arrival.

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I think this is right. There's the political aspect -- it's hard to convince people of something's merits if it is too complicated. There's also the democratic aspect -- people must, to the greatest extent possible, understand the core functions of their government. It's easy to ignore simplicity in the drive for efficiency.

One can go too far the other way, though. Sometimes problems are both too big to ignore and don't have known, simple, efficient, and effective solutions. It's also easy to ignore efficiency or effectiveness in a drive for simplicity, and end up either not solving the problem or solving it at too great a cost.

I think the appeal is that it sounds simple -- you say "I bought my house for $1M, and I don't want to move, so I set the value at $2M, so I have to spend $20,000/yr to keep it, or someone can give me $2M and take the house."

That's the sort of thing that sounds very unappealing to the average voter. "I have to pay property tax on substantially more than it's worth and keep raising it on a regular basis, otherwise some property speculator might make me homeless" is much easier to understand than notional efficiency benefits.

Same goes for the Harberger tax on copyright, which is basically "only people and corporations who are already rich deserve to extract market value from their creations"

It really reads like a fun thought experiment which in practice is really impractical for real-world use cases.

"I can make your life miserable and I have enough money to do so" is something that can happen in the real world and that the average person doesn't want to happen. Tthe Statute of Anne was created b/c previously printers could essentially publish any work that wasn't already in publication by another house... which is in some ways closer to a Harberger tax situation, but was widely hated by everyone who wasn't one of the publishers who monopolized access to the printing presses.

I think that drastically underestimates the (american, at least) knee jerk opposition to taxes, discomfort with novelty, and fear of having to move. Why would anyone go from a place where they pay a flat percentage of the assessed value to this new framework?

Ask what this looks like a solution to.

Scenario: Your local town assessor hates $ethnic_minority and starts assessing everything in $minority_neighborhood at 5x its former value so that they get taxed to death.

Scenario: Your local town assessor hates rich people and starts assessing everything in $wealthy_neighborhood at 5x its former value so that they get taxed to death.

Scenario: Libertarian demagogue mayor decides to eliminate income and sale taxes, and this is his proposal to fund what few public services will remain (at a very low rate). It works, but having virtually no public services remaining has predictable effects and gets him thrown out of office. Rather than rebuild the old system (and start an interminable fight over the specifics in the legislature) the decision is made by the next administration to simply adjust the rate on the new one upwards by a thousand percent.

I'm not saying these are credible scenarios, but treat this like a novel where you've written the last chapter; What is the most plausible way that a polity got from here to there? It's a more circumstantial way of thinking - "How might this occur?" than planning hypotheticals, which work more like "How will I achieve this next year in our current universe using my own actions".

For the love of market efficiency!

realistically there should just be some kind of homestead exemption for one primary residence. several states already have such a system, where you get reduced or frozen property taxes, and protection during bankruptcy.

might be that the more onerous a taxation system, the more likely society will implode.

the stamp act, the townshend act, the boston tea party, etc...

might be "tax what you want less of" could be... citizens.

The Boston Tea Party was because the British made tea cheaper which undercut tea smugglers.

If anything, product dumping (which happened to improve the lives of tea consumers, but hurt smugglers) was the motivation, not taxation. In that case.

Oh, yes, because the tax code is simple.

The tax system for the average American is, frankly, simple (or simple enough).

You pay a flat percent of most purchases as a sales tax. It varies by geography, but most people spend their day to day life in a single place (their home town).

You pay a flat percent of your home as a property tax. Most people who own property don't move, so while it varies regionally, you don't have to think about any but yours.

You pay a percent of your salary as income tax (it's technically progressive, but i don't think most Americans really think about this conceptually outside of tax filing). Your employer takes out this for you, and then once a year you fill out some forms that seem scary, but for the average American are actually somewhat straight forward. The government writes you a check back if you over paid.

Then everyone talks about all the loopholes and stuff that rich people and businesses get. Most Americans never touch 99% of any of that, and just think it's a way for the rich to get richer. Some people talk about charity tax deductions, but most people don't know how that works, but also wouldn't really benefit from this. Similarly there is the vague idea of business write-offs that no one really understands nor needs to know about.

This is an amazingly simplistic view of what actually happens when doing taxes for everyone I have ever met. The number of deductions you need to consider and figure out if you qualify for, even for someone fresh out of college, can be overwhelming. Heck, anyone with a child may has tons of "is this deductible" expenses, above and beyond any child tax credits (which they may or may not qualify for).

I'm outside the "average" nowadays, but I've been paying someone to do my taxes for me for decades because I don't have the mental bandwidth to figure out all the things that could save me money on my taxes. All the way back to when I was earning well below the poverty line (though I paid someone less back then).

Do most people actually qualify for any meaningful deductions? Does a married couple, say, two minimum wage workers, both on W2, really qualify for any meaningful deductions? The median American household earns about 60k a year in income.

Most people should probably take the standard deduction, and not try to itemize their taxes? Most deductions require you to actually spend a certain amount of money to save anything, and the standard deduction is like 30k.

There are millions of permutations of different deductions, and that makes taxes seem scary, and society talks a ton about all these different rules, but I’m pretty confident that the average W2 American stays well within the happy-path of “employer takes a percentage of your income, and you ack that in April”

In the last decade there's the rise of all the online tax prep software (that isn't run by Intuit) which just ... asks you questions.

That's it, that's the hack that solves the problem of all the weird deductions - reducing it to word problems that you can answer - there's definitely a few dozen of them though.

I don't think that "can be reduced to a questionnaire" is an effective indicator of simplicity. The IRS forms themselves are essentially word problems.

The DeepMind personality cloner just asks questions. It is definitely not simple.

It's about as simple as it can get, plain questions - "Do you own a boat or did you buy one this year?"

At some point there is irreducible complexity, but most tax questions are of this nature for all normal people - a huge portion of people could file a form 1040ez and be done with it.

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