Yet how woefully it has failed to curtail growing inequality. The well off have proven for millennia they won't support the hardest hit on society. Governments have to do that.

And yet what is a government except people who are doing what they can to maintain the power they have?

Oh yeah when thy rich can mostly openly, or at least legally, buy politicians nothing will change.

I hope the US can pull themselves out, but everyone seems stuck quibbling over the extremes of minor issues, rather than important difficult topics.

Or worse, quibbling over minor issues to avoid settling important problems so that there's a platform to motivate votes

You're forgetting that what we [should] optimize for is the general welfare of the population (based on human moral code). Taxes are just one way to redistribute [some] gains that are lopsidedly awarded by the market, since in certain cases we do not want winner-take-all behavior (but instead to optimize the welfare of the many).

This is a middle ground between communism and capitalism and seems to be what works best in practice. Or you could call it market socialism (though that's leaning more into socialist direction).

Unregulated, un-taxed markets do not do that. They support exploitation and extraction (at the extremes).

Forget the moral code... how long would this rich people last without the government protecting them? Should we have a free for all? That's the way you start the revolution and the rich loose their heads...

Be careful what you wish for: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2017/06/26/land-and-liberation-...

The egregious-ness of taxation is seen only by the amount of money spent, not in the fashion in which it's collected. If you want lower taxes, you have to specify what things you're going to cut. (And you have to be honest about it: singling out tiny programs you disagree with doesn't even begin to cover it.)

All taxation is "double taxation". There's only a finite amount of money in the system. It just moves around. The government pays for its spending by taking a bit of it every time it moves. There's no single fair way to do that; everybody will always say that it should fall on somebody else.

Eliminating "double taxation" isn't a reasonable or useful goal. To cut taxes, you have to cut spending. And "cut spending on everybody but my priorities" isn't a useful way to think about that.

Came here to say this. Everyone wants the services taxes provide, no one wants to pay taxes.

> If you want lower taxes, you have to specify what things you're going to cut. (And you have to be honest about it: singling out tiny programs you disagree with doesn't even begin to cover it.)

I read an article saying that if the US federal government wants to cut the deficit to zero with no tax increases and avoid touching the entitlement programs (social security, medicare), they need to cut 70% of every other program. If you cut it evenly, it's 27%. 27%! Here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/06/upshot/balanc...

If you want to cut spending, bring on the detailed proposals.