zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.

>>andy_p+ex
Taxes are not an automatic good. There are things we want the government to do. It costs some amount of money to do those things. We should figure out what that amount of money is, tax enough for it, and the rest belong to the person who earns it.

Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that giving them more will improve anything?

Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're to fund the government enough to perform its necessary functions. That's all.

>>imgabe+zj1
Ppl's obsessions (on both sides) on taxes is so weird.

Governments can fund themselves in numerous ways, not just taxes. Either way you'll pay.

The key issue is do we want a federal government expenditure of 20-25% of the economy? I'd say no.

>>sbsudb+Fy1
This is such a stupid argument. Is your issue that the number is too high? Why? What’s the right number?

Should government spend 25% percent of GDP? Who cares. Governments shouldn’t aim for a specific number, they should spend enough to make sure full employment is achieved, according to saving desires and the private market’s appetite for investment.

Whatever the private market isn’t willing to invest, the government should take care of.

Whether that’s 10% or 50% is literally irrelevant.

>>amroch+lS2
The government only gets money by skimming off the top of private enterprise. If the percentage is too high then there’s nothing left to skim and the system collapses, so yes we should care what the percentage is and we should want it to be as low as possible.

We should be demanding ruthless efficiency from the government, not dreaming up new ways for them to take our stuff.

>>imgabe+Xf3
No, you have no idea how sovereign economies work. Taxes don’t fund government spending. Learn about economics before you complain about the number being too high.

>>amroch+Gq3
> Taxes don’t fund government spending.

Cool, then let's just do away with them altogether. This is great news. All those people saying I needed to pay taxes so I can have roads and schools and a military and everything must be wrong.

>>imgabe+nB3
Again, go read up on economics. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

>>amroch+G65
Smugly insinuating that you’re right without providing any sort of reasoning does not make you look as cool and smart as you think it does.

>>imgabe+wa5
You arguments so far have been “the number is too big” and “let’s get rid of all taxes” so I don’t feel like you’re very serious about having a discussion.

>>amroch+jq6
Look, if you actually knew what you were talking about you would be able to explain it in a few sentences. I'm guessing you're misremembering something you never really understood from the econ elective you took in college ten years ago and so all you can do is say "go read a book" because you don't really understand it beyond a vague notion that taxes are somehow unnecessary to fund the government.

Like, just as a basic common sense test, if it were possible for the government to spend as much as it wants without taxes, why wouldn't a politician implement that, eliminate taxes, and immediately become the most popular politician in the history of the world? If it were as easy as you say, surely that would have happened. Since it hasn't happened, it stands to reason that maybe you don't know what you're talking about when you say the government doesn't need taxes to fund spending.

>>imgabe+nC6
Ok, I’ll explain it in a few short sentences.

Assume you have a new country with no money. How does anything get done? The central bank needs to issue capital that the government then allocates first.

Eventually this money makes it down to the citizens of the country who spend it. Then the government can tax that money, and that gives it non-inflationary spending room to reallocate those resources.

For example, there’s a car company that’s using up most of the country’s steel supply. But the government wants to shift the country’s manufacturing from cars to other green industries. What the government can do is tax the car company so that it’s not able to use up as much steel, which frees up resources for other industries to utilize.

The same goes for people, since people are a country’s most important resource. Through taxation the government can influence the resource allocation of the country. That doesn’t mean that the government can’t spend without taxes though.

If you want to learn more there’s plenty of resources out there, you can start with Keynes, skip anything from chicago, move on to MMT for the latest theoretical thought.

>>amroch+wp8
I do not think "skipping to MMT" is the right plan for understanding mainstream economics, or any kind of economic theory likely to govern decisionmaking in the near future. I think some of the core ideas in MMT took a real bruising over the last couple years.

>>tptace+BY9
I might be wrong, but my impression is that MMT has been pretty good at predicting economic outcomes.

The main reason I suggested it is because MMT is the only innovation happening in economics, and understanding the core concepts has been very helpful to me.

The only other game in town is synthesis, which has been a dead end for decades and has very poor real world predictive power.