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Originally Posted by Karma Police  Here's the thing I thing many of you are losing sight of. Government has to take the money from somebody who doesn't want to give it. That's the nature of ANY tax. Sorry, that's life, and you can only get money from people who have it.
So, the question is, "What is the least objectionable kind of tax and who should pay it?" |
Nobody likes to pay taxes of course, but they're necessary for civilization to be possible. However, there's certainly a difference between a flourishing civilization and a stagnant civilization. Let's recap why we have taxes in the first place. The government is responsible for public services like education, road construction and maintenance, sewage systems, public safety (police, fire department, army) and so on. These are all funded by taxes. The issue here though is that to be truly fair, taxes have to be charged in proportion to how much of the public services a person uses. The reality is that a wealthy person may use slightly more than a poor person but certainly not a huge amount more. Taxing wealthy people a greater amount fundamentally means that someone else (the government) decides what a "good enough" standard of living is for someone, at which point any further income can be taken away. This is socialism at best, communism at worst and no healthy free market economy can exist under these conditions.
I think what others have said in this thread is makes a lot of sense. Poor people are poor for a reason, and wealthy people are wealthy for a reason. Wealthy people did something right to get to where they are, and poor people are doing something wrong. Taxing wealthy people more just because they have more money is equivalent to compensating for incompetence of poor people by punishing the success that the wealthy have achieved. Government services apply roughly equally to the wealthy and poor (and the poor actually get more in the forms of Medicaid and Welfare). Wealthy people essentially have to cover the fee that poor people should technically pay for these services. This is happening already by the way, with 96% of federal tax revenue in the US being paid by 50% of the population.
The only solution I can provide is to reduce the size of government and increase the amount of private services. This isn't possible for everything, but it certainly is possible for many things. Private industry is
always more efficient, cost effective, and eclipses the government in value creation. This reduces the need for taxes in general. Wealthy people can use their money to create privately funded public services, and do a better job at it than the government. So my answer is that the least objectionable kind of tax is no tax at all.
And if you're going to have taxes, they should be applied fairly, not based on who can afford to give up more income, because nobody has the right to decide how much income is "enough" for someone else.