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A comment on House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, eliminating income tax. Parent comment

Re:House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, elimina... by jfengel on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @05:42PM (#34332567)
Whether it could, in theory, be done better locally, then at the very least you'd need to plan for that. You can't just turn off the Social Security Administration, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security etc and assume that the states will pick up those jobs tomorrow.

We could have a decent argument about which jobs are better handled by a federal government and which aren't. The notion that the federal government isn't actually doing anything and could just vanish tomorrow is absurd and not worth discussing.

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Re:House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, elimina... by prottog on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @09:51AM (#34339037)
How about the notion that the federal government is doing way more than it should given its remit under the Constitution? That's my point, not that it can and should cease to exist.
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Re:House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, elimina... by jfengel on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @10:28AM (#34339480)
I don't actually believe that, because the Constitution is deliberately vague about what the government can and can't do. It exists in its current form as the result of 250 years of evolution, following the rules at each step as best it could.

Even so, I'd be willing to say, "Sure, fine, the government is doing more than it should". That's pretty vacuously true, and also irrelevant. Getting people to agree on which parts are important, and finding a better way to implement them, seems a more germane question.

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