The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top

Re:The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top by mikepurvis on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @08:34AM (#21269655)

I don't really agree. There's a lot of value in having general revenue that can be directed toward the needs and priorities of the day— making these decisions is what our elected officials are there for. Especially when you consider the kinds of broad benefits that certain policies can have— for example, consider the billions needed for something like a new rapid transit line. Where should that come from, given that it offers mobility to people without cars, stimulates construction and job growth along the line, etc? It has a lot of broad-reaching benefits and knock-on effects that are hard to even completely quantify (think stuff like public health impacts due to air quality improvement and people making short walks to the station a part of their daily trips).

The other issue with the pots system is that it can give people a false sense of entitlement about things which benefit them. For example, consider the commonly-held belief that gas taxes pay for all road and highway infrastructure, and that roads and bridges wouldn't be falling apart if the government would stop "raiding" the gas tax pot to pay for other things. This is trivially googleable as untrue, but the pervasiveness of this belief blinds motorists to the reality of how much their preferred mode of transport is subsidized.

So people in this mindset approach a discussion about something like subsidized train fare and it's hard for them understand why it's a good deal for society.

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Re:The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top by tomp on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @11:30AM (#21271444)

Sorry for miscommunication. I completely agree that there should be a "general" pot and that a lot of taxes are spent and used in at least nominally (if not efficiently) good manner (one big exemption IMO is war-related spending).

I'm mainly saying that it would be easier for people to accept new taxes if that was the implmementation (and specifically taxes like wealth tax that are ostensibly "to decrease inequality" and not "because we hate the rich").

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Re:The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top by mikepurvis on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @11:52AM (#21271729)

Oh I see. Yeah, certainly there's merit in that, but it can be a challenge communicating it effectively. For example, Canada now has a nominal carbon tax that's revenue neutral— all the revenues go into an upfront rebate that's doled out on a per-head basis with a slightly greater amount if you're rural vs urban. All this seems perfectly reasonable and is aligned with what economists recommend as far as ensuring that the system isn't subject to partisan criticisms or whatever else.

But if you actually look at the rhetoric around it, the right wing party that's in opposition slams it as being a "cash grab" and a "tax on everything" that makes life more unaffordable for everyday Canadians. Literally one of the main planks of their platform this election is scrapping a revenue-neutral tax in order to help Canadian families "get ahead".

So was there any value in going to the trouble of doing the rebate? AFAICT claiming the tax was revenue neutral mostly just opened up the gov't to a ridiculous semantic argument about whether it was truly revenue neutral given that sales tax was being applied after the carbon tax. Maybe it would have been easier to just impose the tax and then pair it with an income tax cut or some kind of investment in existing social safety net programmes?

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