> When Professor Cost left his job at Wachtell, Lipton, he took what I estimate to be an 85% pay cut. What would motivate a man to do such a thing? From a government accountant’s point of view, Professor Cost has made a terrible mistake. Whereas before he had earned, say, $2,000,000 in income annually, now he was earning only $300,000 annually. Such irrationality! In a socially just world he would be punished for costing the government $700,000 in tax revenues per year.
What nonsense. The writer assumes that the final goal of the goverment is to increase revenue. That is how corporations work, not governments. The goal of government is to represent its citizens to try to achieve the society that citizens want. The goal is to maximize well-being (whatever is each person definition), not cash.
From there on, everything falls into this kind of missing the point arguments.
> The goal of government is to represent its citizens to try to achieve the society that citizens want.
This is something we tell ourselves even though we know it isn't true. Take something like the Iraq War, which had abysmal support for many years yet continued on for no good reason. Or what percentage of our CIA operations would the general public feel represents their interests? And how many billions of taxpayer money is wasted on special interests that only a tiny fraction of people care about?
Most governments don’t remain in power for more than a few years. They are constantly changing. Which prevents what you’re suggesting from happening.
Unfortunately, many strong men governments around he world have rigged their elections and/or face weak enough oppositions that they have been in power for way too long, in which case this does indeed become a possibility.
> Most governments don’t remain in power for more than a few years. They are constantly changing. Which prevents what you’re suggesting from happening.
Over 4 million people are employed by the US Government, with the number being elected to those positions only in the hundreds, and those appointed numbering a few thousand. The reality is there is very little turnover in the government.
Let's not turn this political and insults. The parent commenter is absolutely right about how it is supposed to work, even though you seem to feel it has failed at that.
I live in Norway, and I honestly feel that the description above matches what I expect from governments, and its how I'd vote. It doesn't mean they reach the ideal, but your description of reality does not match my observations at all.
If that's the case, when was the last time the size, responsibilities and revenues of the government have meaningfully decreased in a permanent manner?
I'm talking the state totally moving out of entire responsibilities, and government expenditures and revenues decreasing by over 15% as a result.
What's absurd is any tax scheme that takes a larger share of labor income than it does of passive income. People who live off the labor of others should pay tax at a higher rate than people who actually perform the labor.
The UK privatised whole swaths of industries in the 1980s and 90s. Telecoms, transport, manufacturing - all were owned by the government and then sold off. Taxes were lowered. The scope of out-of-work benefits was reduced.
> If that's the case, when was the last time the size, responsibilities and revenues of the government have meaningfully decreased in a permanent manner?
What government are you talking about? The U.S. government? Any government anywhere?
Governments change all of the time. Look at the end of the Soviet Union for a recent example.
Why would maximizing the well-being of its citizens naturally result in abandoning responsibilities and shrinking by more than 15%? That seems counter-intuitive to me.
It is sad how normalized your cynicism has become in the U.S. Too many people in the U.S. (I’m not claiming you are from the U.S.) share your view. Many Americans have forgotten what the purpose and role of society ought to be. Instead of accepting an adversarial relationship between government and the “good of the people” we ought to fight, not for less government, but rather for better government.
This article is looking for meaning in the tax system where there was never any to find. Whatever your philosophy, taxes are arbitrary. There is some broad consensus that we can't tax people who have no money. People act as though a lot of questions in the tax system have been settled but it takes very little thought to realise it is a stack of conventions with flimsy justifications and questionable incentives. Nobody with the power to change things seems to have a stack of evidence of why any particular configuration is expected to lead to better outcomes. If they do they really should talk about it more.
There are groups who believe that the tax system should encourage certain objectives. Which specific group has power keeps changing (a much deeper trend than mere political parties). The tax system is a jumble of competing ideas. Sometimes, if something is grossly unfair, the rules change. Other times they don't.
Not all taxes are arbitrary. You can't argue that taxes on natural resources are arbitrary. Take mineral resources as an example. I think it's very difficult to find the idea of taxing the use of these resources as absurd in a similar fashion to those presented by this article. Same can be said about radio spectrum.
If we applied the same philosophy to land, we'd need much fewer "arbitrary" tax types and percentages.
Our tax systems are indeed deeply flawed and arguing that any system is arbitrary and equally absurd/paradoxical/inefficient is incorrect since there are examples of ethical (and I would argue necessary) taxes.
> You can't argue that taxes on natural resources are arbitrary.
We can swap the Income Tax for an Air Tax if that helps, air is a resource. Charge by lung capacity. Big fellas do tend to make more money so it'd probably be a rough proxy for wealth and class I expect.
Resource taxes:
* Disincentive producing resources.
* Are still arbitrary.
Fundamentally what a tax is recognising is that Entity A did the work, but Entity B should decide who gets the fruit of that work. There is no acknowledgement that Entity A might be better than B at deciding what to do, or mechanism to test it, or even really a jury to decide it in practice (in theory the legislators could, but frankly I don't think any of the legislative bodies I'm aware of could tackle that sort of micromanagement). We don't even have consensus on what value system we should use to decide which entity was going to make a better decision even if we have perfect information about both hypothetical resource allocations. It is all ultimately arbitrary.
Even the no-tax pure free market solution is arbitrary, the argument in favour of it is it has the incentive structure that results in the most production, and big picture history suggests that maximising production will get best overall living standards. But it is clearly arbitrary, people love to point out the wild wealth differences between people who seem pretty similar except for minor differences.
These are not academic or theoretical concerns, this stuff is the meat of most of the big political debates that rage on.
Calling some of those taxes does distort the reality a little - a natural resources tax for example is really the state selling the resource owned by the state to a third party (which makes not "taxing" it even more offensive to effectively corrupt).
I see a couple of straw-mans in the reasoning. First is the claim that taxation assumes that working you get paid for nothing - "When I work hard to earn money, I’m not getting something for nothing. I’m getting something for my time and my time has value." - that is not at all the point, the IRS doesn't assume that. You get paid for your time AND your skills AND your willingness to exchange both for value, whatever value you choose to receive.
Which takes us to the barter part of the essay.
There is a major difference between paying someone to do your chores or doing them yourself. What's the difference? The value you are willing to exchange not to do the chores yourself, of course. Be it lack of skills, lack of time or valuing that time spent doing something else more than what you're giving in exchange.
In other words: the IRS recognizes that you own your own time and are free to do with what you want, but when you exchange it for something of value - money, services, goods - you will be taxed on that value.
Not entering the discussion on taxes: both the lawn mowing person and the house cleaning person recognize that there is more value in the other's time for a given task than their own time, if and how much that differential in value should be taxed it's a different conversation.
"You get paid for your time AND your skills AND your willingness to exchange both for value, whatever value you choose to receive."
Still leaving out one major part: the willingness of some other entity to trade your input for money at a mutually agreeable rate. You can be willing to trade 55 hours a week of high-quality work for $3 million a year and not find an employer.
That leads to a much bigger question. Can human society only be civilized if there's a government drawing boundaries and enforcing laws?
I've never liked the idea that we would devolve into chaos if our government wasn't there keeping us all in line. It assumes that a) there are some people who know what is best for all of us and b) that we're effectively signing up to live as animals in a zoo.
Don't get me wrong this isn't some anarchist dream, I don't want to find out what happens without a government. But I can't sign up for the idea that a government and its taxes are a fundamental requirement for any form of civilized society.
I believe in inter-human relationships, trust and reputation. If you have a community of people where everybody knows everybody, you likely don't need greater authorities.
But that's not how the world works, and you will often deal with people from which you cannot know how trustworthy they are. Nothing stops a gang of thugs from outside to come steal and kill without repercussions.
There's some good research being done in regards to prisons in Calofirnia. And how an increase in prisoners has cause a massive deterioration in social conduct.
There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Yes the society we have today is structured in a way that's dependent on a government authority, but that could very well be because we built this society alongside ever-growing governments.
Maybe the question doesn't matter now that this is where we're at, but at best I think it's be safe to say government taxes are necessary for the civilized society we have today.
Even the smallest human groups tend to end up with governments quite quickly. A tribal chief is a government. Taxes might not be necessary for the simplest governments that provide no services, but as soon as a government starts providing things for the people it governs it needs resources, and thus some way to acquire those resources.
Taxes are /one of/ the prices we pay to live in a partially-civilized partially-capitalist society.
We are not aware of non-hypothetical long-term widespread high standard of living completely non-capitalist societies (yes, that's a bunch of qualifiers), but there is certainly a range of taxation, legal and social policies that work to varying degrees of success.
The truly wealthy are making much of their money passively, income tax isn't really something they think about. The government would need to increase the estate and capital gains taxes to actually balance/unburden things.
It is kind of absurd, especially once you get into the messy bits around bartering and gifting. But then all sorts of elements of modern society are absurd when you look at them closely.
It seems that once you get into the world of macroeconomics, everything is absurd in some way or other. It's all just a great weird fiction that we all buy into because it keeps society running. Money itself is a weird social construct. GDP is completely mad.
What does the author suggest we do instead? Something that isn't as absurd?
It's a tongue-in-cheek essay, I'm not sure the author intends to suggest an alternative.
The way I think a out the barter rules is that they are there to keep people from using barter terms to describe non-barter economic activity. In other words, if someone lives their entire life avoiding cash or instruments of cash, but trades units of work for goods to deliberately avoid income taxes, the rules allow the IRS to say nope, we see through you, you're putting in 32+ hours and getting what other people pay roughly $50k/year for, so what you really have is a full-time $50k job, and you owe taxes based on that.
A world without such rules might be a world in which many, many more people "barter" time for goods and services in just that way.
Income tax is absurd - we should tax wealth not work.
By penalising those who work hard, it destroys social mobility and entrenches the establishment landowners and conservatism.
Income tax and VAT should be replaced with wealth tax, Land Value tax, property tax, inheritance tax, gift tax, etc. - i.e. tax the accumulation of wealth itself and use that to help level the playing field and promote economic activity (startups, technological disruption, etc.).
And wherever possible/feasible, tax should be replaced with fees. A company that uses public streets a lot compared to another one should pay more, even when they have the same revenue/profit.
That is a fair way to do it. But it won't work in practice, because they consciously do not want to do it. Hypothetically if they did it that way then their efficiency/capability would be evaluated, which is something that an incompetent or and lazy does not entity wants.
I think of it more as a hack than an absurdity. It's a defined point when a defined amount of cash is transferred from one place to another.
Ideal time to tax.
If you suggest something like a land value tax then people will worry about how you value something without a market price. It is in some senses abitrary what your land is worth (Not actually a problem in practice but makes the point why a hacky system might prevail in the real world).
Higher income people buy more stuff with a higher price tag. VAT is the most fair way to tax. You can reduce it for essentials such as baby formula and increase the rate for luxury cars, etc.
What is fair? For people that can save most of their money, VAT is a neglible proportion of their income. Poor people which spend all of their money (and more!) will pay a lot of VAT proportional to their income.
The first person might pay more in absolute terms, but that doesn't sound fair to me.
As a society, we want people saving for the future and investing in businesses. If someone’s doing actions that are beneficial to society, I see no reason to tax them. But as soon as you buy the Lambo … you get taxed.
Let’s take another example. Two middle-class households with exactly the same income. One household, is putting every cent they can towards a 529 plan for their kids college education. Any left over goes towards retirement. The second household, spends every dollar they have on luxury items and toys.
Why should both households be taxed at the exact same rate?
Consumption does not scale like that. If I consume 30% of my salary under the median income, there’s no way wealthy people making say, $10 million a year are spending 30% of that on consumption. Sure, some might, but many recent 1st generation wealthy are savers and would tend to invest income, not consume it.
VAT is regressive without some kind of subsidy or UBI.
Again you have your head around that all money should be taxed. And the government owns a percentage, or it’s not “fair“.
As long as the rich dude is investing it in businesses and things that push the economy forward, I see no issue with it. And of course that rich dude one day is going to wanna buy the Lambo, boats, and boob jobs for the girlfriend … and that’s when we tax him.
And by the way you’d be shocked at how much is rich people spend. I literally know guys making 10 million a year, with virtually no savings.
There's a lot of the middle ground between "median income" and "$10 million per year". There are stories in the web about people who struggle to make ends meet on $400-500k income, because of "lifestyle inflation": big house, expensive clothes, eating out in fancy restaurants, exotic vacations - those people would pay tons of VAT tax :)
For people who actually make $10 million per year, and do not pay much in VAT, there are still better ways to tax them than the income tax (which they can avoid with some tax optimization scheme), like property taxes, or capital gain tax.
So disincentive saving to a ridiculous degree? If you managed to spend every single cent you earned you'd pay no taxes. Save or invest anything for the future pay a 80% tax on it (you have to compensate all the lost revenue somehow...).
It does sound like a great way to increase consumption and short term GDP growth...
Different people have different consumption patterns. Corporations are incentivized to maximize profit (shareholders want a return), individuals are not...
401ks / pensions / other government approved savings schemes all over the world already exist - they are normally income or tax deferred. Generally they work well, especially relative to people's normal savings efforts.
1) corporations consist of people who use services provided by government
2) on top of taxes paid by people who are part of a corporation, corporations pay a lot of other taxes. E.g. taxes on commercial vehicles, commercial real estate and lots of other special taxes depending on jurisdiction.
While societal control is maintained by pushing financial obligation to the masses, both debts and taxes represent the nuclear upgrade to capitalism that unilaterally enforces the system.
Debt grants its users a taste of what they can not yet afford, subsequently reinforcing the notion that work is equal to progress while also ensuring continuous participation within the larger financial system.
Taxes guarantee the debt-free still participate in commerce. One cannot simply be self-sufficient when property taxes are due annually.
Within this system, every citizen must participate in some form of commerce to meet those obligations. Neither goats nor gold can satisfy this bill; hard currency is required.
This construct does not benefit the majority, only those who hold power and seek to keep it. Neither currency nor commerce represent the underlying problem; they are merely instruments designed to thieve power from man.
Taxes don’t really have to be fair or just. In German, the noun for „tax“ is the same as the verb for „steering“ even!
In Order for our societies to work in practice, taxes are needed. What to tax and by how much is up to political debate…
But there is evidence that high taxes combined with a great welfare state and some redistribution allows even capitalist societies to thrive. It even gets better when you specifically use taxes to reduce the difference between rich and poor.
There might be less billionaires in such situations, but everyone else is MUCH happier and well off.
So, from a consequentialist standpoint, more taxes, especially if progressive and hard enforced, are better.
Every counter argument to that seems to construct some reasoning from pure egoism and assuming someone is not a product of his environment - and ignoring the very first thing I said - taxes don’t have to be fair or just
No question that of course other taxes are needed with the explicit goal to take it away from billionaires.
Nevertheless, income tax is still needed, too. Usually it is designed progressive so that the lower income spectrum barely pays anything and it can go really high for obscene salaries
What nonsense. The writer assumes that the final goal of the goverment is to increase revenue. That is how corporations work, not governments. The goal of government is to represent its citizens to try to achieve the society that citizens want. The goal is to maximize well-being (whatever is each person definition), not cash.
From there on, everything falls into this kind of missing the point arguments.