I believe that if all people of my income paid more, we could make a difference.

I support all people of my income, including me, paying more taxes and opposed me alone paying more taxes.

The evidence you've provided does not provide significant support to your conclusion.

Here's what WOULD support your conclusion: If given the choice between someone who would increase taxes for people of my income or keeping them the same/lower (ceteris paribus), I voted for the latter. If I'm voting for the former, that straight up contradicts your position.

Guess how I vote. Guess how the author votes.

You don't want to pay more in taxes -- you don't believe it would make a difference, despite knowing how numbers work, and knowing that it literally would. I suspect you mean that the marginal difference for the government doesn't justify the loss for you.

That's fair, but it's exactly GP's point: you don't want to pay more taxes, because you don't care when there's no reward for you personally; instead, you want millions of people to pay more taxes for your benefit.

That's exactly how numbers work. Marginal increase of income from a single taxpayer is worthless to the government in isolation, and has zero impact for anyone. Hell, it's probably of strictly negative value if someone has to create a special account and procedures just for you.

Consider this as an illustrative example: if you were to suddenly start paying 2x the taxes you used to, literally nothing the government provides would change for you, or for anyone else for that matter. But if the entire country suddenly started paying 2x the taxes, you could expect much increased quantity and quality of public services.

Just like many private enterprises, government services too tend to have a lot of fixed costs, low marginal costs, and non-uniform access patterns.

If all people pay more taxes, a large majority of us will see a net benefit that outweighs our own cost.

I support raising taxes for everyone, including myself. This should not be a difficult concept to understand.

Are you suggesting that there's a magic threshold that needs to be crossed where individual contributions amount to more than the sum of their parts? If so, what is it, and why does it exist? And why does that threshold always seem to be conveniently too high for people who claim they want to contribute more?

Yes, of course having more money scales the ROI superlinearly. Lots of projects can't be done at all without a minimum investment. Others just have economies of scale (e.g. dilution of fixed overhead).

And considering that the government usually does stuff on very large scales, it's not strange that a single taxpayer's contribution is too small to be meaningful. Just creating a government program probably takes more than what I pay yearly.

No, I'd say they want millions of people to pay more taxes (including themselves) for everyone's benefit. The comparison is between an account that a few people can contribute to and not make a significant difference, vs everyone agreeing to raise tax rates and therefore have more common wealth.

Society benefits from taxes being spent on amenities, healthcare, education, police, when less taxes are spent everyone benefits less.

I donate money and goods to a couple, carefully selected, charities every year. Having volunteered for them on a couple of occasions, I can definitely tell you my relatively modest help DID make a big difference to at least a few families.

I am not forcing anyone else to be charitable, yet there are many people who give (much more than I do).

There are two problems with your thinking:

- the return on our taxes paid in the USA is very, very low - we pay only a bit less in taxes then people in Europe, yet the infrastructure is crumbling, there are lots of desolate/mentally ill people in the streets, etc.

- you seem to want to FORCE people to pay more tax for your noble causes. Guess what - not everyone will agree with you what they are. That's why taxes should be limited to defense, law enforcement, public infrastructure, standardization, etc.

My hypocrisy does not detract from the veracity of the belief that taxes should be higher for people like me. That belief is correct/true/valid or wrong independent of my hypocrisy.

Okay, but I don't regard you as an sort of moral actor for that: you intentionally don't do something you readily admit would make the situation better, out of your emotional needs, while politicking to force everyone to do the thing you're not actually willing to do yourself.

So no, I simply don't believe you: I don't think you believe you should pay higher taxes, I think you believe other people in your income bracket should, to run society the way you envision. If somehow that didn't apply to you, but applied to every one, well that would be just fine wouldn't it?

I originally didn't agree with GP, but the posts like yours trying to refute it are actually bringing me around to that position -- because they're deeply morally compromised, full of special pleading, and so on.

..you're not actually willing to do yourself."

That should be:

...you're not actually willing to do solely by yourself.

As I said, what does it matter if I'm a hypocrite? My belief that taxes should be higher for people like me is true or false independent of my hypocrisy. The question of taxation levels should not be determined or influenced by the level of my own personal hypocrisy.

I don't think you believe you should pay higher taxes, I think you believe other people in your income bracket should,..

You inserted other. This is wrong. I believe all people in my income bracket should pay more in taxes. This includes me. I do believe that government should tax me more. I'm also not going to donate more to the government if it isn't forced. Free rider problem and all that.

There's no special pleading in my position and I don't claim that my position on taxation levels is some sort of moral action on my part. All I've said is the following 2 things:

1. Taxes should higher for people in my income bracket.

2. I'm not going donate more to the government than what is required.

Make of this what you will. I'm a hypocrite. But I still think taxes should be higher for people in my income bracket and this obviously includes myself.

I still believe tax rates are too low for people in my income bracket. Also one should ponder that the marginal effect of donations to the government by me are neglible but when done on the scale of millions of people they end up not being negligible. I don’t think me paying an extra $x thousand will actually help anyone. I do think that millions of people paying $x thousands more will. In this case, size matters.

Then by the same logic, doing so when other people pay won’t actually help anyone either.

Replace the word other in your comment with everyong in the tax bracket I’m in and you’ll see that your conclusion is wrong. Consider this analogy. Me pooping in the local lake isn’t going to adversely affect the lake’s ecology. A million people doing so will.

It sounds like you think government waste implies $1000 is meaningless. Certainly $1000 in some private folks' pockets will materially help them.

We're talking about marginal returns here, i.e. whether or not the author should donate that extra $1,000 to the government. Donating that extra $1,000 when other people don't will help just as much, if not more, as when other people do.

You are consistently confusing marginal effect and aggregate effect in your posts. You are consistently misunderstanding that there is a huge difference in effectiveness in everyone in a tax bracket having increased taxes versus a single person paying the increase in taxes. There’s big difference in me wanting to pay $1,000 more in taxes versus wanting everyone in my tax bracket to pay $1,000 more in taxes.

What I’m discussing is precisely marginal effects and not aggregate effects. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18836313. Read more carefully next time.

Your emphasis on marginal vs. aggregate is why you are wrong and why your statements are wrong.

Nowhere did I make that claim.

> Your emphasis on marginal vs. aggregate is why you are wrong and why your statements are wrong.

No. You just can't read, apparently.

That's not what they said, at all. You appear to think everyone is maximally selfish and short-sighted:

you believe others should pay...if that somehow didn't apply to you...that'd be just fine

That is not the case. Not everyone thinks like this.

Having thought about this a bit more, the idea of "not being taxed enough" is not necessarily about raising revenue for the government. They don't need to take your money to tax you, they can just print money and tax everyone with inflation. The point of taxing the "rich" more is to level the playing field. It is prevent power from concentrating in people who are not democratically accountable. So in that case, donating your estate will not achieve that goal.

Whether or not taxes should be raised is independent of whatever level of hypocrisy I possess.

"I want to pay more taxes" is obviously a stand-in for "tax rates should be higher", not because we love taxes, but because they help us achieve national priorities. Individual action doesn't do that, which is precisely why they're national priorities.

It's all great in theory, but every single developed country wastes billions in taxpayers money every year on all sorts of irrelevant things. Politician pet projects. Projects going massively wrong and overrunning in cost at inflated prices. Inefficiencies. Etc..

I'd rather donate a healthy amount of money to a nonprofit of my choice (and yes, take the tax deduction for doing that -- can donate almost twice as much!). Those charities generally will be able to allocate said resources much more efficiently.

You do realize that people do seemingly contradictory things, right? And sometimes have overtly contradictory beliefs relative to their actions. As Saint Paul referenced; the thorn in his side.

My beliefs versus my actions in this instance is an aspect of the free rider problem. Look it up.

I don't know anyone who is hungry so I can't directly give food to the hungry. One can seek out an organization to provides food for the hungry. I believe that the organization best suited to do this government. Besides, there is more to the proper running of a society than just feeding hungry people.

We need roads, sewers, clean water, a legal system, police, teachers, etc. The umbrella organization that we give money to in order to provide these things is the government.

Empirically speaking, government is one of the least suited and efficient organizations to do this [1].

“[Government] income redistribution agencies are estimated to absorb about two-thirds of each dollar budgeted to them in overhead costs, and in some cases as much as three-quarters of each dollar. Using government data, Robert L. Woodson (1989, p. 63) calculated that, on average, 70 cents of each dollar budgeted for government assistance goes not to the poor, but to the members of the welfare bureaucracy and others serving the poor. Michael Tanner (1996, p. 136 n. 18) cites regional studies supporting this 70/30 split.

“In contrast, administrative and other operating costs in private charities absorb, on average, only one-third or less of each dollar donated, leaving the other two-thirds (or more) to be delivered to recipients. Charity Navigator, www.charitynavigator.org the newest of several private sector organizations that rate charities by various criteria and supply that information to the public on their web sites, found that, as of 2004, 70 percent of charities they rated spent at least 75 percent of their budgets on the programs and services they exist to provide, and 90 percent spent at least 65 percent. The median administrative expense among all charities in their sample was only 10.3 percent.”

[1] http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_2/21_2_1.pdf

Thus it is safe to say that government is much more efficient at accomplishing these goals than charity. Charity is much more efficient at the margins. It’s great for the fringe cases once the majority of the problem has been addressed.

That's a silly conclusion.

I'll gladly vote for a policy measure that benefits a group of people at the expense of a group of people among which I find myself.

But I won't vote for a policy measure that benefits a group of people at the expense of just myself and nobody else. In that case, I would prefer a straight up donation of my own choosing. As such, this Danish bank account would see no money from me.

If you're familiar with the prisoner's dilemma, which is a toy, two-party example, there's a massive difference between coordinating cooperation and unilaterally taking the cooperate action.

For an overly reductive example: a rich person could support higher taxes (including his own) to be raised to a level that could feasibly fund a social safety net on par with a UBI. If he were to unilaterally provide his portion of higher tax revenues, the government wouldn't instantly implement a minuscule, partial increase in the safety net. OTOH, a consistent tax regime based around a consistently higher revenue base is a fiscal environment in which we could move further towards this person's preferred policies.

(Note that I'm making no endorsement or rejection of the specific policy described above, just using it as an example to point out how nonsensical the complaint in this thread is).

I'm not saying it is irrational for the author to advocate raising taxes for everyone, including themselves. I'm saying that if the author really thought donating that extra $X to the government (when other people do) was such a good idea, they would be donating it right now even if other people don't. The reason is that the marginal benefit to the government of the author handing them an extra $X when other people do the same is no higher than when they don't.

Unless, of course, the author plans to dodge the tax themselves once taxes are raised for everyone.

The prisoner's dilemma is not a valid comparison because donating when the other person doesn't yields an equal or higher marginal return as donating when the other person does. In the prisoner's dilemma it's the other way around: cooperating when the other person defects results in a lower marginal return than when the other person cooperates.

This is an aspect of human behavior. Sometimes people won’t do something if they aren’t forced to even if they think its a good idea. This is why the free rider problem exists. Your conclusion ignores facts surrounding human psychology. People don’t see a $1,000 donation to the government as being helpful if it’s just them doing it. They can see it being beneficial if millions of people do it. Hence an individual is unlikely to make a voluntary donation to the government whilst supporting increased taxation for everyone in their income bracket.

Which conclusion? You basically said I'm correct.

> if the author really thought donating that extra $X to the government (when other people do) was such a good idea, they would be donating it right now

Which part are you disputing? Your comments about human psychology merely support the fact that the author doesn't really think it's a good idea, and that there are psychological factors other than rationality and honesty at play.

I don’t want to pay more taxes. I want myself and those in my peer group to pay more taxes. Your referenced experiment proved little other than that a few of the Dutch don’t understand game theory (or are just really philanthropic).

Or perhaps people want everyone, including themselves, to pay more taxes. A fair, equitable, and shared burden.

If it's just you, you feel like a sucker being taken advantage of.

If "a lot of people" is simply the 99.9%, and "Others" are the super rich 0.1%... I'm pretty sure the 99.9% would massively benefit... and the "others" would probably still be extremely rich.

What they should have done is make a rule that says if I pay into this special account, everyone else's tax rate goes up.

See what happens then.