You know, I love these posts calling for high taxation by relatively young people who are just starting their careers. Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations. Or major medical not covered by insurance.
We'll see what much higher taxation looks like to you then. It's not that more income equality isn't a good goal, but there are plenty of people with their backs against the wall.
I'm a strong open source advocate, but when I saw Richard Stallman years ago talk about how all software should be free, my first thought was "Easy for him to say. He doesn't have any dependents."
I do consulting work and my rates are high. Believe me, it's not because I'm greedy it's because I'm trying to get by.
You do realize the reason they're calling for high taxation is to reduce the costs of kids going to college, child support, and the elimination of major medical not covered by insurance?
Edit: Sorry, child support should be removed from that list; I was thinking of the costs of raising a child, not what you pay after a divorce.
If the cost of those and impact of taxation varied at the same time and the same degree that would be no problem. But that has never happened. Given the state of our governmental problem-solving ability in the US all those numbers can do is diverge.
Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Your taxes can drive up demand to make you even wealthier. Except, perhaps many wealthy people don't actually want more wealth. They just want to be better off then everyone else...
It's not irrelevant - you claimed that the reason legislative deadlock occurs is that people refused to be taxed more. What about the people who refuse to cut automatic increases to spending? Are they to be absovled?
Considering the context of this thread, which is about reasons to increase spending and the fact that this would never happen in a deadlocked legislature, the idea that people who refuse to cut spending would be to blame is sort of contradictory.
So if you had fair universal taxation ( what a progressive tax plan is ) with universal education, universal health care and minimum standard housing you would be relieved of the burden of educating your kids and of housing them until their mid-30's ( which seems to be standard for the upper middle class locally ) and you think you would be worse off?
Myself, I'd go a bit further than the author, and say that rather than require that taxes be paid only with money, everyone should contribute 30 to 60 days of their year to doing government work. This gets around the whining that some are non-contributing, and it fosters a sense of shared enterprise and social justice through equality of contribution that is sorely lacking in our culture at present. Now the details of how that labour gets applied to building infrastructure for the common good would need to be worked out, it would be a much fairer system than we have now, and much less subject to being gamed. It would also serve as mixing function, forcing people who would otherwise never come in contact to deal with each other as collaborators in the cause of the greater good.
And if global climate change picks up the pace we will need such a work force. Imagine if we dealt with a hurricane Katrina every month, or three super-storm events equivalent to Sandy every winter. It's not too soon to start planning on contingencies like that.
No offense but I think your second paragraph is much too idealistic. You're describing a sort of jury duty, but for doing government work.
"Now the details of how that labour gets applied to building infrastructure for the common good would need to be worked out, it would be a much fairer system than we have now, and much less subject to being gamed."
People already crack jokes about working in the government, doing a minimal amount of work. Imagine if people were actually mandated to work in government instead of paying taxes. Nothing would be achieved, because no one would seriously want to do the work. Or the people who had positions of power would abuse them to no end.
You describe a nice system, but how would it ever be implemented in practice? What kind of media campaign/propaganda would be required to convince the entire country they should work hard at serving each other? Would this shift be characterized by a revolution? Perhaps it would start small, in communes? Would the shift happen nationally or on a state by state basis (in the US)?
We have this thing in Australia called work for the dole http://deewr.gov.au/work-dole , basically a watered down version of what was suggested. It has had quite a few changes over the years and has been hugely politically unpopular, but in my post uni bumming around days, I was drafted into one of these programs, and it was really fantastic. Everyone whinged (as we will) but everyone enjoyed themselves and got satisfaction from actually doing something societally useful. I've never experienced anything quite like it in a government, commercial or non-profit environment. The camaraderie, the weird mix of people, the kooky old retired navy guy who ran the program - so much gold.
I agree, that it's hard to do, but it did seem like it would solve some of the above problems.
As batiste suggested below, some countries do have a mandatory army service. As someone who served a bit more than a year in just such an army, let me point out how paying taxes in cash is vastly superior a solution to paying in work:
I am an application developer with a very narrow set of "deep" skills. Working as such, I get to charge rates that reflect those skills' depth. If I pay my taxes, I am taxed for some 260 days of work at what I'll call my "peak" rate.
If I were to be drafted to do government work, the probability of me working in that very area is extremely small. Even if, every know and then, I'll get that lucky batch of work, I'd still spend a lot of time getting to know the respective code base, the objectives of that project and, after a week or two of acutal work, passing things on.
Much more likely, I'd end up in an office somewhere. I am somewhat able to hackishly use Excel, so that might be what I'd do: I'd hack up a couple of unmaintainable spreadsheets to solve some problems which I wouldn't actually be proficient in. Were I to do that work for a client, I might, at best, charge half of aforementioned "peak rate".
If that government work were to be sloppily organized, I might even end up working outside, cleaning up a forest or assisting in building a road. As you may imagine, I'd be a terrible fit: While I consider myself healthy, I'm not used to outdoor work. At best, I might accomplish 2 hours' worth of skilled labour in an 8 hour day, at worst I'd screw more shit up than I'd fix.
Paying cash, I get to contribute at peak_rate * tax_level and leave the government work to people actually hired for their skills, not the amount of available draft days.
Also, I assume many a startup wouldn't take too kindly to missing each of their employees for another month a year. Some countries already do (e.g. Switzerland: 300 days of mandatory military service, done (as in "doing time", rather than "serving") in one part of 21 weeks and some 6 annual parts of three weeks), and while co-workers missing another three weeks per year is certainly bearable, it still seems a mostly useless burden.
First off, you probably wouldn't be working in your precise specialty but in one where you had a foundational knowledge that would let you be cross-trained. Second, as I envision it, it might be more along the lines a national or global scale version of a volunteer fire department; software engineers in California helping to figure out where to build emergency housing and storm-resistant infrastructure on the South Carolina coast.
It’s not really, if nearly all of your income is in the top income bracket getting taxed at that rate. And if most of your income isn’t in the top bracket, why earn that income at all if at least 91% is going to be stolen from you and the marginal return is so low?
> Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations.
From both my studies of the tax code and comparison with people who have between one to four dependents, it seems to me the US tax code mitigates these factors with exemptions (~$4k per dependent?) and various deductions/credits ($2k and up). It's also easy to see how the expenses of having a child could outstrip that, of course, but the point is that (a) it's not as if people making policy decisions have particularly decided to ignore this factor and (b) as if we couldn't visit this issue as long as we're dreaming about how we structure things.
Heck, a guaranteed income might well apply to the kids we're talking about.
> Or major medical not covered by insurance.
Yeah, the US system kindof sucks. We've socialized the costs of most expensive phase of people's lives, we privatize the "market"* for the healthiest and most productive, and we pay from the public treasury more than any other civilized nation per capita for the privilege of having inadequate coverage for major and minor events. You can also deduct a lot of this from your tax burden, though.
I am not having children, I had a vasectomy. I don't live in CA, so no 50/50 divorce settlements or state income tax either. Guess what though, I would gladly pay 40% of my income as income tax if I could be assured that healthcare and education would be treated as a right rather than a campaign item. Scandinavia/Cananda/Japan are not ranked as highly as they are in the human development index for nothing.
Most people I know (I study CS in Canada) are counting down the days until they graduate and leave for the US. There are few advantages to living in Canada over the US unless you're poor/disabled/unemployed.
interestingly, all the costs you just described should in theory be written off in a sane tax system. People/families should be taxed on their net wealth gain, not gross income, and I don't understand why we only give corporations that affordance.
We'll see what much higher taxation looks like to you then. It's not that more income equality isn't a good goal, but there are plenty of people with their backs against the wall.
I'm a strong open source advocate, but when I saw Richard Stallman years ago talk about how all software should be free, my first thought was "Easy for him to say. He doesn't have any dependents."
I do consulting work and my rates are high. Believe me, it's not because I'm greedy it's because I'm trying to get by.