[tantaman]

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

[BrenBarn]

We don't need to use the tax on government bureaucracy. We can just give it right back out as direct payments to the non-wealthy.

[webdood90]

> Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody

Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.

[wrqvrwvq]

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.

I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.

It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

[timbray]

I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them.

On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.

[wrqvrwvq]

These kinds of operations are rampant in all cities. There's a line of people to waiting to sell their ebt/stamps.

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410

[tyg13]

> The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.

The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.

Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.

[0]: https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-3/

[pstuart]

Waste happens any time people are spending other people's money (and it happens in corporate land all the time too).

Any time people bring up concerns about fraud and waste in social problems only, I dismiss them out of hand as using that fear to justify their selfishness.

If one isn't calling out waste and abuse in their favorite programs too, then their concern is insincere and should be treated as such. Pro tip: audit the DOD.

[metabagel]

> Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

There are zero studies which show this.

[wrqvrwvq]

How would something like this exist at all if it weren't true?

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410#m

[youngtaff]

> The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary,

Free money as in quantitative easing that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy?

[denkmoon]

> Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

Completely unsubstantiated FUD. The underlying problem is the structure of the economic system they reside in.

[NickC25]

>It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

Value for whom?

[webdood90]

Why do people stan for billionaires? I don't get it - what motivates you to say this stuff?

Most of what you said is greatly exaggerated or simply not true. It's like you cherry picked Fox News talking points.

[shigawire]

Because they've been propagandized and don't have the time or inclination to think differently.

[ThrowawayR2]

You're on a site created by a VC fund for startups and startup employees and you are surprised that its inhabitants are in favor of wealth accumulation and capitalism? Don't shoot the messenger; I'm just pointing out the obvious.

[webdood90]

Fair!

[idle_zealot]

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society.

It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.

[jandrewrogers]

> destroying the taxed wealth

Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life?

Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.

[nullocator]

I don't think I can personally farm a Yacht into existence, so not sure that holds water. Over the last several years the "value" of several of my skills has basically gone to zero as technology advanced, so I'm not sure that I buy in the modern era at least skills are a good indicator of wealth either, nor can I likely acquire a Yacht with pure skill alone.

I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"

[tormeh]

The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.

[idle_zealot]

I guess I need to clarify that I don't support lighting farms on fire. Wealth is liquid, it's the abstract concept of who owns what, who has the right to compel behavior. A destructive tax is just one that doesn't have corresponding spending on the balance sheet. I'm also not even saying that's a good policy, just better than what we're doing now. There are trivial improvements, like spending it on paying off the national debt.

[gazebo2]

Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns

[pocksuppet]

If we did it today the tax would be money. It doesn't make sense for the government to seize 2% of a factory.

I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.