Re:Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?
by nopeYouAreWrong on Saturday November 25, 2023 @06:47PM
(#38417902)
expense as a percentage of gdp is a nonsense number. expense as a percentage of the actual budget makes far more sense. why are we accepting silly statistics here?
Re:Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?
by actuallyalys on Saturday November 25, 2023 @07:43PM
(#38418214)
There are pros and cons to every statistic. Percent of GDP accounts for the fact that the economy is growing, which means more to tax. I used it primarily because the article does. I think percent of receipts makes more sense as receipts are essentially the agency’s product.
One idea the author suggests is that tax agencies will grow to take up roughly 1 percent because 1 percent of the budget is so negligible. The U.S. provides an interesting contrast. In 1955, the IRS was 0.08 percent of GDP [0] [2]. In 2008, it was 0.093 percent of GDP [0] [1]. So it's much lower, but also has remained fairly steady between 1955 and 2008. Looking ahead, the new IRS budget is around $20 billion, which is 0.072 percent of GDP [0]. To pick another example, the Canadian Revenue Service was about 0.2 percent of GDP in 2018 [3] [4].
One other assumption is that the Australian Tax Office does the same, at least when normalized to GDP. I'm not sure that's true, but investigating that would take more time.
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/irs-budget-increase-technolog... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYGDP [2] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/budget-united-states-gov... See page 1000