[rayiner]

I've always found this concept somewhat amusing. What is "my money?" If I bill $X for my employer, I see maybe 1/3 of that between salary, benefits, and overhead. Is the employer taking 2/3 of "my money?" No, because if the partners weren't bringing in the clients I wouldn't be in a position to bill for that work. The same is true for every employee whose employer profits from their labor. I think the same is true for employers and employees with respect to the government. Is the government taking 1/3 of "my money?" I wouldn't be making that money without the vast array of services the government provides. Now it's not an argument for whether I'm taxed too much or too little, but I feel like the government has a legitimate right to some of the income it helped me earn. I don't think the concept of "my income" makes much sense in an interdependent society with fine-grained division of labor. We act together in large economic units, and there is no naturally right answer to how we divide up the proceeds of that work.

I could move back to my parents home country of Bangladesh if I didn't like the taxes. It's tax burden is 8% of GDP versus 26% of GDP here. I don't for the same reason I don't leave my firm--I make more money even after other people getting their cut than I would on my own.

[yummyfajitas]

I wouldn't be making that money without the vast array of services the government provides.

What services? Please be specific.

Before you cite services like roads, fire protection, etc, please go look at what your taxes are actually spent on: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total

[rayiner]

The single thing I benefit from the most is the government's suppression of the physically strong. In the state of nature, people like me would not be at the top of the economic hierarchy. Those gangs on the south side of Chicago, lording over their impoverished little domains, would instead lord over me.

We, through the government, impose rules that favor the smart over the strong, that favor creation over acquisition. These rules enable the wealth of our society. But they are not cost-less, nor are they the natural order of things. There is a large class of losers in this system, and I consider government spending that redistributes some of the fruits of societal production to be part of the cost of imposing these rules.

Moreover, many of these expenditures benefit businesses directly. Public education is an enormous subsidy to the business world. My firm's clients are all large companies that collectively employee millions of people educated on the public dime. Since our economy is built on mental activity, rather than manual labor, it is of enormous benefit to companies to have readily available educated employees. Moreover, many items of spending, such as food aid, primarily go to children. It is a tremendous benefit to the business world to have a next-generation workforce that doesn't suffer from the cognitive issues that can result from malnutrition.

The expenditures that are the hardest to justify are the ones that are generationally redistributive, like Social Security and Medicare. On the other hand, these require the least justification--they are benefits mostly paid for by separately-marked taxes, that every taxpayer can benefit from personally.

And I'm not even going to get started on how tremendously economically valuable agencies like the EPA are.

So before you talk about what our taxes are spent on, try to cultivate some perspective about what exactly enables the incredible wealth we have in our society. As I said, my parents are from a country with far less government than we have. It's hellish. You don't want to live like that, trust me.

[yummyfajitas]

Those gangs on the south side of Chicago, lording over their impoverished little domains, would instead lord over me.

4.4% of government spending protects you from peaceful people who wish to enjoy drugs in the privacy of their own home, as well as the gangs you seem to fear. Another 14.3% protects you from Iraq and the Soviet Union.

As I said, please go look at what the government actually spends your money on before replying.

[rayiner]

I'm not making the simplistic argument that I'm glad that the government protects me from gangs. The gang example is illustrative of a deeper point.

The government's institution of property rights, which are protected by the police, army, courts, etc, makes everything around us possible. Without that basic order, there is no wealth creation. In the state of nature, a skinny nerd like Mark Zuckerberg is not king. In the state of nature, the kings are the people in the gangs: young, strong, capable of using and organizing force. I don't believe in a god that says "thou shalt not steal" or "thou shalt not kill." I have to depend on a utilitarian justification for the existence of property rights: that they allow the existence of the kind of complex society necessary to create wealth.

The imposition of this wealth-creating order is not free, and the cost is not just what we spend enforcing order. The cost is enormous: taking away the only natural ability common to all people: taking what you need. When we create property rights that allow a landowner to own vastly more land than he could personally defend, we take away the ability of people to hunt and fish and subsist on that land as they would in nature.

I believe that programs like welfare, food stamps, etc, are the moral obligation concomitant with the imposition of this highly artificial order. The order exists because it results in the greatest good for the greatest number, but in the process it creates a class of losers. I believe we have an obligation to take care of, as we can, the losers created by our order. I consider such expenditures to be a cost of creating that order that ultimately makes my income possible.

You don't have to agree with me. I think it's immoral to impose an order that prevents people from fending for themselves outside that order, and then to not provide for them. You may disagree with that.

Beyond that, even if you disagree with that premise, line item thinking is still nonsensical. For example, take the spending on Medicare and social security. You can disagree with whether national insurance is the most economically efficient way to take care of the elderly, but the cost wouldn't disappear if we got rid of those systems. Instead, the elderly would move back in with their kids, as they have done through human history. The cost to you is not the cost of the program, but the cost of the program minus the cost of taking care of your parents yourself. This is generally true for every line item--you have to engage in an alternatives analysis instead of chalking up the whole dollar value as not benefitting you.

Moreover, in many situations the cost to provide a service would be much higher without the government. For example, consider the 15% of all spending that goes to education. Our modern society would not be possible without this education, and employers benefit from it tremendously (what is the incremental benefit to an employer of someone who can't read versus someone with a public education?) People act like education is something that benefits individuals, but at the end of the day, an individual only benefits from his own education. An employer benefits from the education of each of his employees. And due to the public good nature of education, it's unlikely employers could provide it more cheaply than the government.

In general, I find the approach of "look how much we spend on X" to be intellectually lazy. Nearly every $1 you spend on taxes benefits you in some way. The debate is not about whether it does, but how much it does relative to that $1 and whether there are alternatives that cost less than $1.

[yummyfajitas]

The cost is enormous...we take away the ability of people to hunt and fish and subsist on that land as they would in nature.

This cost is negligible as well. The cost is merely the cost of providing hunting/fishing levels of food, and it is only owed to the small subset of people who would be better off as hunters. We're talking about $1-5/day here. A few $B in a $12T economy.

In addition to your wildly incorrect accounting, you seem confused as to what a public good is. Education is a private good, being rivalrous and excludible. You again cite a tiny fraction of what is provided (literacy + numeracy) while ignoring the vast majority of spending (most of high school and college).

[rayiner]

> This cost is negligible as well. The cost is merely the cost of providing hunting/fishing levels of food, and it is only owed to the small subset of people who would be better off as hunters. We're talking about $1-5/day here.

Only if you use an artificially narrow definition of "better off." Would you rather be a hunter/gatherer in a world of hunter/gatherers, or a hunter/gatherer in the modern world? If you consider only the value of food, the two are fungible. But if you consider the whole range of things people attach value to (social interaction, etc), the former is far preferable. This is a false objectivity that is common with approaches like yours. Just because certain sources of value are "fuzzy" does not mean they are objectively valued at zero. Also, you're ignoring all the modern findings of behavioral economics that notes that people perceive value relatively. Acknowledging that fact, simply paying for hunting/fishing levels of food does not put people in the same position as they would be otherwise.

> In addition to your wildly incorrect accounting, you seem confused as to what a public good is. Education is a private good, being rivalrous and excludible.

Sorry, I was imprecise. I meant to say that education generates large positive externalities. Though I should point out in my defense that it is not uncommon to use "public good" to refer to something that generates large positive externalities but does not meet the technical definition of public good...

> You again cite a tiny fraction of what is provided (literacy + numeracy) while ignoring the vast majority of spending (most of high school and college).

The point is that when someone gets an education, they are not the only nor even the primary beneficiaries of that education. When I buy and eat a cookie, only I enjoy that cookie. When I get an education, the marginal increase in my economic value is split between me and my employer. In many companies, the employer benefits more from the education than you do. One need only look to see how employers flock to areas with top-tier engineering schools (the Bay Area, the Research Triangle, Atlanta, Austin, etc) to see how much employers benefit from public education.