My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.
There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.
Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected.
But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues that they care about.
I would be completely in support of people self-allocating their taxes as long as (1) the distribution still had to add up to 100% so you can’t under contribute and (2) government offices capped their income and redistributed excess to the general funds instead of letting some feel-good departments waste money they didn’t need but were allocated.
How?
Russia invades the Ukraine. Ukraine defends itself. Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons. None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia.
I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.
Ukraine isn’t our ally. That’s a silly sentiment. Ukraine is a developing country wholly comparable to say Zambia or Namibia. Our interests just happen to align this way this time around.
You know what, I agree.
Ukraine is a highly developed country, in some ways more than the U.S. Its people are certainly way more educated, on average.
If you can't get that part right, then I doubt you have much to tell us about the context of the war or whether Ukraine is an ally or not.
My wife's side of the family is entirely Russian, so I have some basic knowledge on the subject.
And they speak decidedly against your claims:
https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdr2020.pdf
Ukraine's development ranking is classed as 'High', while Namibia and Zambia are both classed as 'Medium'.
My wife's side of the family is entirely Russian, so I have some basic knowledge on the subject
I have direct knowledge of the country as well. Your wife can say whatever she wants to say.
Yet you know they're out there somewhere, and that they speak for themselves.
A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.
If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.
So I don't pay Israel's defense budget, but that money is reallocated evenly to everything else.
I find it hard to believe a meaningful number of people would opt out of libraries and schools assuming their overall tax burden is unchanged.
I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.
Empty nesters or childless people will funnel their tax money to things like parks, fire trucks, and other things.
Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.
Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.
The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.
That other stuff doesn't even cost a significant amount of money by comparison and could be well-funded from the savings.
The government doesn't lack for revenue, it lacks for efficiency.
The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.
Federal outlays are not granular enough and increasing Federal outlays is pretty meaningless.
If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN.
For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos.
No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market.
If you want a counter to this dogma -
1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious
2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar.
3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.
4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees.
Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team.
Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility.
The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight.
How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans.
If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ?
Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.)
Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries.
Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.
One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when the number of regulations becomes excessive and their sheer number thwarts competition by creating high barriers to entry, but "incumbents want fewer regulations" is not only misleading but typically the opposite of what really happens.
Incumbents want to get rid of regulations that protect competition and add regulations that inhibit it. What we need, of course, is the opposite. Which isn't as simple as "make number of regulations go up/down", it matters very much which ones and what they do.
> Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength.
This is completely the opposite. Compliance costs are generally fixed costs, i.e. every entity has to hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000. For a megacorp this is negligible and they don't even notice, for a small business they're now out of the market because that amount of expense would bankrupt them. The more rules you have, the higher that number gets. This is the sense in which the absolute number of rules matters.
But it still depends what they are. Even if you only have a couple of rules, the incumbents will want rules that only they can comply with. Conversely, you can hypothetically have a lot of rules and still have them easy to comply with, though this is certainly easier said than done. What you really want is to have a small number of rules, but the right rules -- the ones the incumbents don't want and their smaller competitors do.
Just to be clear, you are quoting typical lobbyist talking points here? I definitely disagree with such a simplification.
I agree with the fact that incumbents want to make it easier to make money.
> This is completely the opposite …
Yes, I am in firm agreement that the content, quality and enforceability of the regulation matters.
That said, I used contracts as an example, specifically to combat this common reduction: “Compliance cost price smaller businesses out of the market, so they are bad for competition and the little guy.”
Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).
Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.
But now we're back to "what the regulation is matters more than how many there are". There can exist rules that benefit small companies, obviously. But if the rules every company has to comply with can fill three shelves at the library, this is not going to benefit small companies because they will be unable to operate.
> Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.
It depends what they are.
One of most insidious is regulations that are ostensibly neutral, i.e. there is a societal benefit of approximately $100 per company on average and to get it the rule is going to impose costs of approximately $100 on the average company. The books are full of these because they provide some ostensible benefit and the cost isn't even being calculated. Nobody fights against them too hard because they're approximately breakeven.
Except that each of them adds $100 in compliance costs to every company, and there are ten thousand of them, so now every company in that industry has a million dollars in compliance costs, which small companies can't sustain. So the rules on their own provide neither benefit nor cost to society, but impair competition, and that has a societal cost.
you and me are back to this.
Most arguments dont get this far, unless these answers are first furnished. Which was the spirit and intent of my parent comment.
And I agree, good regulation is better than absurd regulation.
> ostensibly neutral… small companies can’t sustain
Sure.
If you had the time and resources, wouldn't you try to affect change in government? It's not fundamentally any different than showing up to your city council meeting to get housing developments approved/blocked, for instance. Moreover, most people don't think of themselves as bad people, so they probably legitimately think they're doing the Right Thing™, rather than being some sort of cartoonishly evil villain trying to ruin society by starving government of funding.
This is going to be hard for the politically inclined to understand, but no, it's simply not the case that everyone everywhere is preoccupied with finding/creating legal ways to push their will/preferences onto other people.
I'm also not sure who you're suggesting is ideologically blind. All I'm saying is that given resources like a huge pile of money, many would not wish to use that money to coerce others or otherwise change their local political situation to better suit them. Instead they'd use those resources to increase their own resilience, i.e. simply choosing to leave the neighborhood or situation that was bothering them instead of trying to change it and assuming their own interests are the best and most appropriate ones for everyone.
As the parent is pointing out, everyone thinks they are doing TheRightThing(tm) when they collect/use power to force their views on others. Instead you could have power/wealth and just choose to not fuck with other people. That's not being ideologically blind, it's just an ideology that says, you know what, even my strongly held opinions could be wrongheaded, and maybe I shouldn't be using my arbitrarily acquired wealth/power to steer anything besides my own life.
It's only a viable option if you trust your political system to function when your back is turned.
You can either opt out, or you can wade into a corrupt system and start finally enjoying your ability to join in on all the corruption. In the 2nd case, what's the plan moving forward for an ethical actor really? Using money to bribe politicians into stop accepting bribes? Should we bribe citizens to stop electing politicians that accept bribes? If you don't want money involved in politics then I don't know how you start to fix that with money.
Not for my own benefit, no. Just like I don't base my votes in elections particularly on my own benefit, and never have.
So perhaps that's why wealthy people seem so tax-averse - they may be as averse as everyone, but for them the aversion is much cheaper and easier to do.
(This reflects a more general principle I summarize as: the only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men are separated from it by enough layers of abstraction.)
I don’t think this is true. Most people pay more in taxes, and receive the pleasure of a refund check come April.
Regardless, most people don't like tax, and there's not much they can do about it if they are W-2 wage earners short of opening a side business or maxing out retirement investments (which isn't helpful to someone trying to buy a house before they are 65).
And if they do, they’re likely not doing it with tax reasons in mind.
No, most people don't care about their tax the way wealthy people do. I ended up in a wealthy family through marriage and I can tell you nobody I my original social circle spent even a fraction of the effort the wealthy do when it comes to taxes.
In that regard, most people minimize their taxes by doing nothing. The wealthy have to put effort in to get the same effect.
https://dailyyonder.com/low-income-families-risk-losing-thou...
When I got a bit more money, mortgage, stock options, investments, etc. then I started to have options - do I pay this way or that way? Do I invest in this account or that account? Does HDHP/HSA make sense for me or not? Should I sell the certain investment to harvest the tax loss or keep it? Etc. etc. then my asset structure is more varied, so are the opportunities to pay more or less tax. I imagine for really wealthy people (definitely not me, still) there are even more options how to pay less taxes, and they are doing right serious considering them (or paying people to seriously consider them) - if I ever get rich, that's what I'd do.
I don't think this is actually true. It's a nice rhetorical soundbite, but if you count properly (e.g. all taxes all assets owned by Buffett actually pay) there's no way he pays less unless his secretary is extremely exceptional for some reason. It is true that her tax structure is probably different from Buffett's, so if you creatively form your query so that taxes that Buffett predominantly pays are excluded and taxes that the secretary predominantly pays are included, you could probably find a way to justify it, but that would not be a valuable insight.
And of course the whole "pays less", as formulated, is a bit deceptive - his rate of one of the taxes is lower as a percentage, but he actually pays vastly more in actual money (Berkshire Hathaway alone, in which he holds a substantial share, pays billions in taxes every year).
What you see as "minimizing taxes" could be a necessary responsibility. If you're on the outside looking in, you may be uninformed about their circumstances and responsibilities. Its definitely a 1% of the 1st world problem, but its still a responsibility that has to be managed; Unless you're familiar their THEIR circumstances, its easy to incorrectly assume motivations.
Be glad you live in a country where you have this problem to complain about.
Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?
Many if not most rich never got rich, they happened to be born rich. In the situation I'm talking about, the said family has been wealthy for two centuries. And my in-laws are significantly less well-off than the generation before. Their ancestors may have been gifted in some way that got them rich in the first place, but there have definitely be some regression to average since then and their management of their wealth has been much less efficient than the one of my parents for instance (who aren't wealthy today, but are still clearly better than their own parents).
In fact I suspect that these people are obsessed about taxes because they know their fortune is ever going downhill because they lack the thing that made their ancestors successful so they spend their efforts trying to salvage their wealth instead of making one of their own.
The rest of your comment seems to be a political commentary on whether inheritance is legitimate. You're entitled to your opinion, but it comes across a bit like sour grapes to me.
I've written the opposite actually. They would be much better off if they tried doing something else with their time rather than spending it avoiding taxes. The amount of effort (and money actually, tax attorney aren't cheap) would be much better invested elsewhere.
What paying more in taxes gets more done in the things paid by taxes.
It's like there is a direct dependency between a money received from the taxes and the things made/built on the tax money.
"Bankrupt" doesn't makes sense as a concept when when you can print the currency of your debt
It is extremely disingenuous to put this conundrum at my feet, as if my actions, with my puny tax which I am too lazy to even calculate how much it would be in percents, but it's sure to have quite a bunch of zeros in front, had even the tiniest influence on those decisions. It never did and never will. Maybe Buffett's decisions may, but not mine. So stop trying to shame me for things that have nothing to do with me and never could have anything to do with me.
The rule of monopoly?
The rule of feudalism?
Greed isn't exclusive to to systems of government.
This, of course, doesn't work if the incumbents capture the government and pass regulations that constrain the competition which is supposed to be keeping them in check.
(defun parkinsons-law (k m p n)
(/ (+ (* 2 (expt k m))
p)
n))
Where:
The retval is the number of new employees to be hired annually
k is the number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
m is the number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
p is the difference between the age at hiring and the age at retirement
n is the number of administrative files actually completedRather than add a bunch of subsidies in the form of tax breaks, the government could just spend money on programs that accomplish the aim they want. By making this complicated system whereby subsidies are accomplished by negating taxes you would otherwise owe, this means these benefits are more likely to help people who are otherwise going to be paying more taxes, and the fact that these require legwork to opt into without being at risk of the government thinking you're defrauding them, it seems kind of inevitable that it would devolve into a subsidy mostly for wealthier people who are good at navigating the bureaucracy of it, or rather, who can pay someone in what has become a cottage industry of tax (evasion) specialists who ply the trade of doing so in service of people who can afford them
Like, yeah, given that the game is set up this way, the obvious objective of it from the standpoint of any taxpayer engaging with it is to pay as little as possible. But if the aim of the tax breaks are something besides creating said incentive (and the industry around it), it seems like bad mechanism design to have it work this way in the first place
My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just spend my days strumming a guitar for the rest of my days. The economy is just a distraction from what I really care about.
ESPN recently did a movie on what happened to poor people who suddenly became multi-millionaires when they joined a pro sports team.
TLDR: they quickly spent it all and wound up with nothing. It turns out to be amazingly easy to burn through a million dollars.
On a similar note, I do understand the peer pressure that comes with being on a team like that. "tradition" where you buy your entire team dinner for a night on the order of high 5 figures as a start. I can start to sympathize with how that spirals when the environment itself pressures you. More reason to make a financial planning class mandatory in school. Won't save everyone, but it'll at least bring awareness.
After all, we live in a market society, shouldn't students be at least able to read a simple P&L statement and balance sheet?
I always wanted to start a business, so on summer break I took a course in basic accounting from the local community college, and it has served me very well ever since.
Will Smith is another cautionary tale. As a teen, he made it big with his Fresh Prince rap songs. He blew all the money on partying. Then the IRS came knocking. It had never occurred to him he had to pay income tax on his millions, which no longer existed. He made a deal with the IRS. On his show "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", all his earnings other than an allowance went to the IRS.
Is there a word for this phenomenon? What makes everyone believe they're a special case?
Consider that the type of people who are more inclined to accumulate wealth are the ones faced with this choice.
The people who'd rather strum guitars don't often find themselves in that position. So your observation is painfully anecdotal and not really useful.
I have some "relative" taste of it in that I'm a lot better off than the past 3 generations of my family minimum. But I was still far from what I consider "wealthy" even within the tech community, let alone to the country at large. I didn't feel it fundamentally changed how I approached finances outside of being more willing to splurge on some tech (something I've always wanted to do) after I put away 20% for savings.
But that's only one magnitude. Who knows, money corrupts for a reason.
The issue here is that it depends what you're trying to do. If you have eight figures then you have all the housing and vehicles you need and more money is not going to make a big difference in that regard.
But that's not what people use it for at that point. Mostly what money past that is used for is business. You own a company and you want to get into the auto industry? You're going to need to pay designers to design the cars well before you make any revenue, and then you're going to need factories and raw materials etc. Suddenly a million bucks is chump change and if you want to make it work you need a lot more.