[alphanullmeric]

It should be neither. Taxes should be a service fee proportional to your usage of a government service. Income shouldn’t even be part of the equation. The USPS charges more if you want to ship heavier packages, not if you get a raise. Personal vs corporate is irrelevant. Pay your fair share.

[howrar]

That works for things that only benefit the person directly using the service, and shipping packages would probably be one of those. It doesn't work if you get indirect benefits from other people using the service. For example, how would you quantify how much you use of, say, a government funded mental healthcare system when your neighbour uses it to get a handle on their life and stop flinging garbage over your fence every evening? Or of law enforcement apprehending a burglar a few blocks away who may or may not target your home next if they were left to their own devices?

[alphanullmeric]

That’s correct, you pay for what you use and don’t pay for what you don’t. It’s irrelevant as to how much something someone else chose to do benefitted me. My lemonade stand doesn’t owe the cinema you decided to open up next to me any money. The only case where you ever have a right to force me to pay you is if we both voluntarily entered an agreement to transact. The “indirect” talking point is something some people like to say so that they can arbitrarily increase someone else’s tax burden by claiming they benefited from an infinite list of things without needing to quantify anything. Simultaneously they can arbitrarily decrease their own tax burden by choosing a threshold of income above their own at which they decide these “indirect benefits” come into play. I’m not interested in that argument. Pay your fair share.

[howrar]

> My lemonade stand doesn’t owe the cinema you decided to open up next to me any money.

Generally, if a private cinema opens up and stays open, it's because they've determined that they profit enough from their direct patronage that it's worthwhile. Since there's already enough incentive in place for this cinema to exist, I don't think it's necessary to get surrounding businesses to fund them. Although in an ideal world, they should get something for indirect improvements to surrounding businesses, but the issue is that there's no way to actually quantify how much benefit you get from it. The current system works well enough in this case.

On the other hand, if you open up a cinema that operates at a loss while propping up surrounding businesses by bringing people in, then your lemonade stand definitely owes them. If you have two competing lemonade stands in the area that only exist because of that cinema and one of them decides to fund the cinema to keep it running, then it increases operational expenses for that one lemonade stand, allowing the other to outcompete. It's a prisoner's dilemma problem. Everyone paying means everyone wins, while if one person doesn't pay, then they win regardless of what everyone else does. Pay your fair share.

[alphanullmeric]

I find it hilarious that you decided to respond to a single sentence out of my comment, and then proceeded to say exactly what I claimed you would say in the rest of my comment. If you can quantify the "indirect benefits" I get from services you chose to use without my input, then you can quantify the indirect benefits a lemonade stand gets from the theatre that opened up next to it. Stop trying to have it both ways.

If AMC opens a theatre next to a kid's lemonade stand at a loss, indirectly benefiting the stand, do you believe he owes AMC money? I'm looking for a yes or no answer, or I'll answer for you. An essay that runs around the question is not an option. If you truly believe the fair share includes "indirect benefit" then your answer should be a yes.

[howrar]

> If you can quantify the "indirect benefits" I get from services you chose to use without my input, then you can quantify the indirect benefits a lemonade stand gets from the theatre that opened up next to it. Stop trying to have it both ways.

I don't see where I'm trying to have anything both ways. I said that you can't quantify this, and that's the entire problem with making people pay for exactly what they use.

> If AMC opens a theatre next to a kid's lemonade stand at a loss, indirectly benefiting the stand, do you believe he owes AMC money? I'm looking for a yes or no answer, or I'll answer for you. An essay that runs around the question is not an option. If you truly believe the fair share includes "indirect benefit" then your answer should be a yes.

Yes. If the two businesses coexisting means that everyone gains more in aggregate than if neither businesses were to exist, then we want incentives in place to encourage them to exist. There's no incentive for this AMC to exist if they gain nothing from it.

> The “indirect” talking point is something some people like to say so that they can arbitrarily increase someone else’s tax burden by claiming they benefited from an infinite list of things without needing to quantify anything. Simultaneously they can arbitrarily decrease their own tax burden by choosing a threshold of income above their own at which they decide these “indirect benefits” come into play.

I thought it would've been clear that my elaboration of your example is meant to address this point without having to quote it, but I guess it wasn't. Sure, that's a possible reason for holding this position, but the existence of short-sighted greedy people does not make the benefits to society any less valid. I presented you with an example of how the benefits can manifest. If you want to debate against this point, some questions you can answer include: Do you understand how this extrapolates to more complex settings like the society we currently live in? Do you agree that these benefits exist? If not, then why? Do you believe there are better ways to encourage this kind of outcome? If so, what are they? Saying "Yeah, but some people only want what's good for society because they benefit from it" is not a good argument against it because the entire point is for everyone to benefit from it. I hope that we can at least agree that we want to build a society with the incentives set up such that we all work together in achieving something that is greater than the sum of the parts, and that is capable of ensuring a minimum quality of life for everyone. If not, then the we just want different things from our society and the discussion is pointless.

In any case, to more directly address this point in case it wasn't clear enough, everyone gets indirect benefits regardless of how much income you have. So with that in mind, since we can't quantify the benefits, the most fair solution is to just have everyone pay the same amount. Now one of the services we want to exist is a social safety net, which means providing assistance to those in the lower end of the income range. We can have a system that has everyone pay into it equally, then pay out again based on need, but considering that the segment of the population that this directly serves are those who wouldn't be able to pay into it, you get the same end result (monetarily) whether you give them a bill they can't pay alongside money to pay said bill, or if you reduced their tax burdens. Then on the upper end of the income spectrum, you can afford to pay a lot more into these services without a significant negative impact on your quality of life, and in doing so, you could significantly increase that of many others. So it's consistent with the goals of increasing everyone's quality of life. It has nothing to do with how much indirect benefit you get from these services.

That said, we're now talking about merits of a progressive tax system. I didn't want to expand too much on this originally because it is completely tangential to the original discussion. As a reminder, I was telling you that a lot of services, if set up to be pay-per-use, would not work because you get a prisoners dilemma scenario. Would you like to refute this or provide alternate solutions?

[perryizgr8]

100% agreed, but that is too radical for most people. So I don't start with that :D