This is the statement I disagree with. Me having a few thousand extra $ at the end of the year does not give the homeless homes, does not allow me to comparison shop for healthcare, does not tell me if the drug at the store is actually real, does not ensure the schools are safe and effective. And I can't buy those by myself for that extra cash. This is how the people under discussion in this article are feeling.
We won't resolve libertarian principles and divides here, but WITHIN THE SCOPE OF THIS ARTICLE, my argument is that the dissatisfied people would not be content if the tax rate is zero, because they aren't dissatisfied about the tax rate. That there is a separate group of people that ARE dissatisfied about the tax rate can be true without being relevant to the first group.
Why not? If you had thousands of dollars a year in extra cash, you could donate to homeless shelters, pay the higher healthcare premiums, subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies, pay for good private schools or donate to scholarship funds, etc.
More to the point, you wouldn't need to pay for them to the extent that they already exist. There currently are homeless shelters and multiple health insurance companies and an FDA and mostly reasonable public schools. But they cost twice as much as they ought to or more. The healthcare market in the US is completely broken, but it's completely broken by inefficient regulations. Some of the costs of the inefficiency are paid in private health insurance premiums rather than tax dollars, but the problem is still the inefficiency.
Drifting off-topic, but the short version is that "subscribe to a service that would independently validate pharmacies" (meaning everything on the shelf at the pharmacy), validating schools, etc all comes down to recreating work that the govt does and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value. I suppose I should get a few degrees to make sure I know how to evaluate these different areas. Hopefully I know which schools will teach me for real and not deliver empty bombastic lies. There's a reason that everywhere that does a good job at these (IMHO) have plenty of taxes.
Ultimately it's a war between where you want efficiency (private market) and reliability (govt).
All of which is mostly unrelated to the point I made above: The people under discussion are upset about results, not taxation. Even if you are 100% correct that giving them their tax money will allow them to fix the issues they are upset about, that's not the same as actually fixing them. And I, for one, pay taxes so that people with the right knowledge, authority, and economies of scale CAN fix those things. Giving me a tax refund is no different than refunding me for a product not delivered - it's better than losing the money, but I wanted the product.
That's kind of the point. If the government is doing a crappy job and you can get your money back, go take it to someone else who can do a better job. Maybe even your state or local government instead of the feds.
> and then making sure that it's more cost-effective to provide good value than it is to be deceptive about providing good value.
This is the exact problem we already have with the government. It isn't inefficient because nobody wants it that way, it's because of regulatory capture and corruption. The only way out of that is for the real party in interest (i.e. the citizens) to be paying attention.
But that doesn't work at the scale of the federal government, because a billion dollars in graft is a rounding error but it's still a billion dollars, so you get a billion dollars of incentive for corruption and the taxpayers only care about that specific thing as much as they care about 0.03% of their tax dollars. But the same is true for every other individual program, so corruption and waste is rampant.
The problem is that we keep comparing the US government to the governments of other countries when it's the individual US states that are at the scale of most other countries. The national healthcare systems in Europe aren't administered by the EU. They don't have a single military or school system. If they did they would have all the problems we have by trying to do it here -- that much centralization is too big a target for corruption and too easy to hide inefficiency in the complexity and scale. There is a point at which more scale no longer yields more efficiency and instead yields bureaucracy and inefficiency.
Do you really want to have to shop around for a service that tells you which drugs are safe? You can't pick the cheapest because they probably cut corners or took industry kickbacks, but are you throwing away money if you pick the most expensive one? Do you just pick the average-priced option and hope they are trustworthy?
That would imply that these "essential services" are worth less to people than the cost it takes to provide them. Especially when the primary customers for such a service would be doctors, so the typical patient wouldn't even have it as an independent cost separate from the doctor's visit.
> At best, we'll end up with the same thing because corporations are greedy and there's not really a good reason to have competition in pharmaceutical oversight.
Why would you not expect competition? We don't have a monopoly provider for credit reporting or product reviews.
> Do you really want to have to shop around for a service that tells you which drugs are safe?
Do you really want to not be able to? What happens when the FDA approves Vioxx or the dozens of other drugs they've approved, often on the market for decades, that will give you a heart attack or liver damage or cancer or birth defects?
Or even worse (since you can't opt-out), when they fail the other way and don't approve the only drug that would save your life?
The issue is not that I trust the government, it's that I trust companies less. Governments have done a lot of bad things, and have done a lot of deception, but ultimately I trust their model of accountability more than I do companies. I'm not against being persuaded...but I don't see a lot of (any?) real world examples of this free-market utopia you describe, nor signs that it would come about. Instead, whenever govt reduces regulation too far, companies form monopolies, perform deceptive trade practices, and break the fundamental concepts of capitalism. That govt can over-regulate does not mean that (1) it must, nor (2) that it is.
All of which is irrelevant (again) to this article, which is stating that people are unhappy with the results. They aren't demanding tax cuts, they want the results. The primary obstacle to results in recent decades has not been the govt being bad at it's job, but people demanding the govt stop doing these things and cutting their funding to do so, then complaining about the govt's inability to fix things. These are the same people demanding bigger military funding and focus on oil, so the govt seems to be doing a decent job of doing what it's asked...it's just not what I and many others are asking for.
The common examples are invisible because nobody talks about things that are working. For example, ever have to buy a box of screws, or a hammer, or a piece of rope? Sold in any hardware store at low, transparent prices with minimal regulation and good quality.
> Instead, whenever govt reduces regulation too far, companies form monopolies, perform deceptive trade practices, and break the fundamental concepts of capitalism.
This is the trap of ideological purism. You can argue about "less regulation is better" or "more regulation is better" as an abstract principle but that's not a way to evaluate an individual regulation. Applying either principle blindly and universally would require either total anarchy or total authoritarianism, which isn't what anybody actually wants.
It's possible to eliminate necessary regulations while still having too many (or the wrong) other regulations -- this is in fact what commonly happens in Washington, because the people who win there are the people with the best lobbyists, whether they want to pass/preserve bad competition-destroying regulations or eliminate good competition-protecting ones.
The advantage of a general principle of less regulation, especially at the national level in an environment known to be wasteful and corrupt, is that you can find alternatives for the national government not doing something -- whether it's markets or citizen organizations or local government. But if they waste your resources on corruption and bureaucracy, you can't recover them to use for something better, which interferes with anybody doing something better.
> All of which is irrelevant (again) to this article, which is stating that people are unhappy with the results. They aren't demanding tax cuts, they want the results.
You keep saying this, but the article doesn't say that at all. It says that people are dissatisfied, not why. And given the demographics of the most dissatisfied groups, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to learn that they would e.g. prefer to reduce military spending.
And if you do want the results, wasting tax money still interferes with that.
For example, you mention homelessness, but that is inherently a local issue. There is a major homelessness problem in San Francisco but not so much in Kansas. And you also can't solve it in SF by building shelters in Kansas. You can't even solve it in SF by building shelters in Bakersfield. The relationship it has with inefficient military spending is that they come from the same tax base -- if the people of San Francisco are paying taxes to fund the military, those dollars can't be used (by the local government or the people themselves) to address homelessness there. Resources are scarce. When the government wastes them, you no longer have them.
> The primary obstacle to results in recent decades has not been the govt being bad at it's job, but people demanding the govt stop doing these things and cutting their funding to do so, then complaining about the govt's inability to fix things.
Only the federal budget hasn't declined. It has been ~20% of GDP since the end of WWII and still is. Which means it has been growing over time, since real GDP per capita is up. If they're providing worse or fewer services than they used to, it's because they're doing less with more, not because they have less in total.
> These are the same people demanding bigger military funding and focus on oil, so the govt seems to be doing a decent job of doing what it's asked...it's just not what I and many others are asking for.
That is the corruption and inefficiency. The people asking for that are defense contractors and oil companies and their workers, who have tons of (taxpayer-sourced) money to lobby with are not a small voting block because the scope of the expenditures is so massive that it employs a large number of people. It's exactly the sort of thing we could reduce in order to lower taxes without impacting the level of actual services provided.
1) So that we can have consistent, reliable, and widely-available services. 2) So the financial cost of society is spread fairly across everyone.
These are not guarantees the free market provides, because the market doesn't care about outcomes. Giving people tax breaks and hoping they donate it to homeless shelters will probably not help all the homeless people in the country. Switching the FDA to an opt-in subscription service will not prevent unsafe drugs from reaching consumers.
Sure I'd prefer government to run be as efficient as possible, but the goal isn't efficiency, it's better outcomes.
The issue is about efficiency. If you pay $2000 in taxes, you want to be getting >=$2000 in value for it. If you have to pay $5000, the value needs to be >=$5000.
The problem in the US is that government efficiency is a disgrace. We spend more on the military than most other countries combined and get... what, oil? We already have oil. And we need less of it, not more.
Our healthcare costs are outrageous and rather than do anything at all to actually address the cost, we just keep increasing the amount of tax money that gets thrown at it -- which only raises the costs further.
Social security is designed to sound progressive when it's really a transfer of wealth from poor to rich (because the rich live longer), and which deprives the poor of money during their working years that they could have used to send their children to college and other investments in the future, intentionally making the choice to retire later or rely on that investment they could (and now can't) make in their children to support them in their old age. Or for that matter have just invested the same money in a major index ETF, which has always had better long-term returns than social security to begin with.
If we were getting what we're getting now and paying half the taxes then everything would be fine, because then you don't have free healthcare but you do have the amount of money it costs to buy healthcare. It would also be fine if we were paying what we are now but getting twice as much. But we're not.