[alacritas0]

The United States is a society of excess. Yet, we still let people starve and go unsheltered. There is an easy solution that doesn't have the unreasonable expectation of the poor relying on the goodness of other people: tax individuals with high incomes at higher rates. The marginal tax rate for the highest income earners has steadily fallen in the past decades. People with those high incomes have the least marginal utility on their income and should have a higher tax burden on the portion of their income which isn't necessary for their comfort.

This isn't to say that charitable giving is bad. If you are financially stable and have money to spare, please donate your time or money to those that need it. It just isn't the solution to a national problem.

[jimbob45]

It’s not that easy and having money isn’t the problem here. If we could pay off the homeless to stop being homeless, you have to believe that we’d have already done that.

SF spends ~60k per homeless person per year (maybe more now). It’s clearly not money that is the limiting factor here.

[ben-schaaf]

That 60k per year seems to come from a small program where they're spending 60k per year for a tent, food and washrooms - twice the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/26/san-francisco-run-homeless-enc...

[samsquire]

Those wealth creators go elsewhere or stop doing a business if isn't lucrative. I think they're called Laffer curves.

Tax more and people do less as it doesn't pay to do more labour and get less of it back.

[VintageCool]

The Laffer Curve argued that revenue from taxation might represent an inverted U shape with tax rate. If you were above the revenue-optimizing tax rate, then lowering the tax rate could increase revenue.

But that revenue-optimizing tax rate, which is the subject to much debate, is probably somewhere around 65% to 70%, far higher than the tax rates in the United States. We could surely increase taxes on high income individuals without doing much harm to the economy.

[seanhunter]

My understanding is every time a "Laffer curve inspired" tax cut has happened in practise, tax revenues have indeed gone down.[1]

The thing about the Laffer curve idea that I don't understand is the curve doesn't need to be continuous. Say we accept at a tax rate of 100% you get no marginal benefit from working so no-one will work and the tax take will go to zero, at a tax rate of 100%-epsilon you still get (small) additional marginal utility for each additional dollar earned, so it's still in your interests to work. So it's literally only at a tax rate of 100% that the Laffer concept would make the tax take go to zero.

[1] https://medium.com/junior-economist/the-laffer-curve-6bb2833...

"In practice, the Laffer Curve has not provided the dual benefits of lower taxes and higher revenue. In fact, every US tax cut since 1965 has been followed with a sharp decrease in tax revenue, while every increase in taxes has led to an increase in government tax revenue."

[bmm6o]

> So it's literally only at a tax rate of 100% that the Laffer concept would make the tax take go to zero.

Yeah, that's the point of the curve. I don't think you've made a convincing argument against continuity.

And the quote seems to misunderstand the curve (I didn't read the article). The curve itself is reasonable, the main debate is where the current tax regime puts you - to the right or left of the peak. The other mistake is that many people using the curve to argue for lower taxes are not really honest debaters. They want lower taxes and use any argument available. They state that we're on the right even though ask evidence suggests the opposite.

[imtringued]

This is why you would tax land as it does not tax human effort.