At some point in my life I took a step back to look at my life and how I’m doing and how much I pay for that life. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky.
My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.
I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.
I’ve gotten to see some of that at a local level and… I just don’t know. We barely managed to pass a local school levy to recoup from a major accounting error that would have meant massive layoffs for the district. It’s a pretty good district academically, and I was shocked at how many empty nesters (new ones, too) were vocal about voting no just because “no new taxes“, despite all of their kids consuming that very system with great benefit for the past 18 years.
A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.
If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.
This sounds like a good way to accidentally create an industry of reverse lobbyists where the government contracts them to convince tax payers to allocate money to their department.
I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.
Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)
> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.
Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected.
But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues that they care about.
I would be completely in support of people self-allocating their taxes as long as (1) the distribution still had to add up to 100% so you can’t under contribute and (2) government offices capped their income and redistributed excess to the general funds instead of letting some feel-good departments waste money they didn’t need but were allocated.
The caps must be high enough that departments are in competition for funds. Presumably the outcome is then that the department for fluffy bunnies is funded up to its cap, taking money away from the department for unblocking drains.
> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.
Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.
Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.
The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.
That always sounds nice until you see how it plays out in universities and other charities. The directed donations don't get sent to where they are most needed; they end up funding large vanity projects.
> Supporting the war in Ukraine is just another example of “bombing brown people”, yet you appear completely oblivious.
How?
Russia invades the Ukraine.
Ukraine defends itself.
Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons.
None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia.
I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.
Of course this time around we have to do the bombing through some middlemen because the brown people have big guns too, and the people aren’t actually brown this time around. They do speak a weird language though and have different cultural values, so maybe that qualifies.
Ukraine isn’t our ally. That’s a silly sentiment. Ukraine is a developing country wholly comparable to say Zambia or Namibia. Our interests just happen to align this way this time around.
The US has no allies, only interests. It interests us to be adversarial to Russia. It interests us to "bomb brown people". None of which is done out of some moral duty.
Is this supposed to be some insight? The very definition of "alliance" says: groups or people who work together because of shared interests. You ally because you share interests, e.g. a specific goal.
The US already spends more on healthcare than just about every other country and the inefficiency of that spending is an obvious problem that should probably be addressed before throwing any more money into the fire. But if it was addressed then the amount of spending needed would go down rather than up.
That other stuff doesn't even cost a significant amount of money by comparison and could be well-funded from the savings.
The government doesn't lack for revenue, it lacks for efficiency.
Our healthcare is horribly wasteful and inefficient. But since the US government isn't in charge of it for most people, you can't blame them here. Our ultra-capitalist healthcare "system" achieved this spectacular waste all by itself.
The US does not have an "ultra-capitalist" healthcare system. Its healthcare system is heavily regulated and subsidized and many of those regulations are bought and paid for by the incumbents to prevent competition, i.e. the thing that allows private systems to be efficient. You can't just call something "capitalism" while regulating it into market concentration and expect that to work.
You're making a "no true Scotsman" argument. This is, in fact, how capitalism works whenever you fail to regulate it. Rent-seeking and regulatory capture is a feature, not a bug.
Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008.
If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN.
For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos.
No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market.
If you want a counter to this dogma -
1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious
2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar.
3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.
4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees.
Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team.
Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility.
The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight.
How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans.
If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ?
Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.)
Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries.
Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.
> Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.
One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when the number of regulations becomes excessive and their sheer number thwarts competition by creating high barriers to entry, but "incumbents want fewer regulations" is not only misleading but typically the opposite of what really happens.
Incumbents want to get rid of regulations that protect competition and add regulations that inhibit it. What we need, of course, is the opposite. Which isn't as simple as "make number of regulations go up/down", it matters very much which ones and what they do.
> Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength.
This is completely the opposite. Compliance costs are generally fixed costs, i.e. every entity has to hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000. For a megacorp this is negligible and they don't even notice, for a small business they're now out of the market because that amount of expense would bankrupt them. The more rules you have, the higher that number gets. This is the sense in which the absolute number of rules matters.
But it still depends what they are. Even if you only have a couple of rules, the incumbents will want rules that only they can comply with. Conversely, you can hypothetically have a lot of rules and still have them easy to comply with, though this is certainly easier said than done. What you really want is to have a small number of rules, but the right rules -- the ones the incumbents don't want and their smaller competitors do.
Just to be clear, you are quoting typical lobbyist talking points here? I definitely disagree with such a simplification.
I agree with the fact that incumbents want to make it easier to make money.
> This is completely the opposite …
Yes, I am in firm agreement that the content, quality and enforceability of the regulation matters.
That said, I used contracts as an example, specifically to combat this common reduction: “Compliance cost price smaller businesses out of the market, so they are bad for competition and the little guy.”
Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).
Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.
> Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).
But now we're back to "what the regulation is matters more than how many there are". There can exist rules that benefit small companies, obviously. But if the rules every company has to comply with can fill three shelves at the library, this is not going to benefit small companies because they will be unable to operate.
> Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.
It depends what they are.
One of most insidious is regulations that are ostensibly neutral, i.e. there is a societal benefit of approximately $100 per company on average and to get it the rule is going to impose costs of approximately $100 on the average company. The books are full of these because they provide some ostensible benefit and the cost isn't even being calculated. Nobody fights against them too hard because they're approximately breakeven.
Except that each of them adds $100 in compliance costs to every company, and there are ten thousand of them, so now every company in that industry has a million dollars in compliance costs, which small companies can't sustain. So the rules on their own provide neither benefit nor cost to society, but impair competition, and that has a societal cost.
The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.
Now factor in the effects of climate change on many communities over the next decades. Maintaining our infrastructure i.e. lifestyle is going to be much much more expensive.
Minor correction: maintaining the lifestyle of billionaire coastal developers and their clientele will be much much more expensive. The poors will continue to be encouraged to eat shit and die as per usual.
The cute thing there being they outnumber the big fish by something like 400,000 to 1 in the US and without them there is literally no economy and no billionaire class.
Austerity in the context of government means spending cuts. "We diverted the tax money to cronies instead of anything that benefits you and spending actually went up" is not austerity, it's corruption.
My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.