Without taxes, society collapses due to the government not being able to do anything because they have no money. Companies abandon regulations and the rule of law in their quest to make as much profit as possible. Corners get cut to increase profits and avoidable disasters like the Grenfell Tower fire occur regularly.
Without government threats of violence to uphold the laws of society, what's to stop the wealthy from hiring mercs to murder your family and take their possessions? After all, don't they have a duty to shareholders to acquire as much profit as possible? What's to stop the masses of poor people from ganging together and cutting off the heads of the wealthy to take their possessions?
Taxes are absolutely essential for a functional society, therefore anybody who is completely and utterly against taxes (a.k.a deranged lunatics) is against a functional society. They want chaos so that they can exploit it for profit.
Rather than scrapping taxes completely, the tax system needs to be changed to stop taxing income and consumption which clearly hit the poorest in society the hardest. Wealth is generated from productivity, therefore productivity is what needs to be taxed, not income. Any tax on a worker's income is simply an indirect productivity tax on the employer which they pay through increased employee wages.
Most taxes individuals pay are actually indirect business taxes. If our tax systems weren't created by greedy, scumbags trying to funnel wealth to a tiny minority of people, those indirect business taxes would not exist and in their place would be a single tax on productivity from both humans and technology.
Essentially, productivity boils down to the amount of money that can be made from every $1 spent. The greater the productivity, the more money could be earned from spending $1. Given that the most productive companies make the most money from the least amount of work, people doing fuck up to earn shit loads of money would be taxed the most while those working the hardest and earning fuck all would be taxed fuck all too.
This is by far the fairest tax system I've seen so far.
"Without taxes, society collapses due to the government not being able to do anything because they have no money."
Just thinking out loud here...
where on the printing press does it check to see if you've collected taxes before working?
If you think this is reductive logic, ask yourself is there any fiscal responsibility in the west that makes you assume such is necessary to operate a currency?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Could you restate your question as I don't know what you're asking?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
First of all, that is an amazing name, props! Love Meditations.
I was merely pointing out, in a roundabout fashion, that pretty much all governments print more of their budget than they tax at this point.
In other words, the link between taxation and seignorage is slipping. Governments are just open printing/QE. At least temporarily, this seems to work regardless of tax receipts.
I agree with your argument, but you can substitute "printed out of nothing currency" for "taxes", apparently.
Not that I agree with it, because it will eventually crash.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I've put in a suggestion in this thread about Land value tax (Check out my comment in the link below). It's a progressive wealth tax and works just fine in cooperation with the crypto world. It leaves crypto alone since crypto uses very little resources, but taxes physical land use which is the ultimate limited resource.
The wealthy elite also happen to own the most land.
It also works great for automation. Automation itself is good for society (less labor for humanity), but the profits used to hoard valuable land by the automation owners will be taxed. Profits that are reinvested into productive assets are not taxed.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@heiditravels/gov-t-regulations-vs-crypto-freedom#@neoncow/re-johnsmith-re-heiditravels-gov-t-regulations-vs-crypto-freedom-20170704t235020176z
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
The problem with land tax is that it doesn't address the main factor of wealth inequality as it still allows those making the most from the doing the least to pay the least taxes (as a % of income). It's inadequate by itself.
Wealth is generated through productivity whether human or technological. So, taxing that productivity fairly, taxes the wealth fairly. If a business can make $1000 from spending $1 they should be taxed at a higher rate than a business making $10 from every $1 spent regardless of how much profit they make.
A proper productivity tax would also prevent over-production and waste.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I have to TOTALLY agree with you on that!!!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Grenfell Tower is located in the Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, one of the richest, most highly taxed and wealth re-distributed locations in the world. Are you even aware of the whopping amounts they rake in in so-called Council Tax alone from every resident household every month? Have you seen how that pile of garbage they call Kensington still looks (and smells)? Makes one wonder, doesn't it...
So, before claiming the oh-so marvellous good of governments and corresponding need to fund them with our money at gunpoint even more generously, you might be well-advised to do your homework first.
Taking your reasoning and your example, the Grenfell Tower disaster proves the exact opposite and is living proof of government never achieving any tangible and meaningful results whatsoever for the taxpayer at the end of the day. Curiously, it was this very government, aka the RBKC, you want to even more generously finance who screwed things up with their "renovation" of that shipwreck. They used taxpayer money to have it done more poorly than even the shrewdest and greediest private real estate investor would dare doing. For all our tax money we have to surrender, these highly-paid losers did not even know construction basics nor did they have the brains to equip the facade of a 20+ floor building with vent blocks stopping the ascent of hot air/smoke under the cover materials causing the particulars of this tragedy.
This is what you get from any and all forced-upon-for-the-common-good (i e socialist) wealth re-distribution schemes.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
So let me get this straight, some disaster occurs in a capitalist nation under a right wing government following right-wing ideology and implementing right-wing policies and that's somehow the fault of the "socialist" tax system?
Most of the things that councils did have been handed over to private corporations to deal with. Housing associations now run council housing, inspections are outsourced to private companies as are renovations, etc. This has been going on since Thatcher the fucking Milk Snatcher came to power. Councils across Britain are facing massive shortages in funding due to ideological fools ignoring the evidence and not giving a shit about the consequences of their actions. Hell, these right-wing ideologues are even paying private foreign corporations to reject people's disability claims to "reduce the deficit" despite the evidence showing that they're paying more to the private corporations than they're saving from reducing claimants.
This is a government who have killed thousands of disabled people through their idiotic, ideologically imposed austerity measures and you're calling them socialist? Are you truly that delusional?
Now, no matter how much I detest these right wing ideologues in power, I'm neither stupid enough nor insane enough to think that giving private corporations direct control of society would be anything but a complete and utter disaster.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
yes, you 'got that straight', more or less -- except you should hopefully be sufficiently grown-up to see that -- while the mass-media may call them right-wing -- there is no such thing as an even remotely "free-market system".
A centrally-planned EU member country like the UK (or any other so-called first-world country for that matter) may or may not be "right-wing" or following "right-wing ideologies" (not willing to nor interested in arguing about that -- nor with you, at all), but in light of all these first-world countries having a tax and related "social" cost burden of around 50% I find it a bit "surprising" that this is still not a sufficiently-"fair" share that's being contributed there...
It's easy to see how "efficient" and "useful" all that tax money is spent and how great that centrally-planned system of one NHS (oh, that's not socialist??), subsidised council housing (oh, that's not socialist??), £60m per day to those un-accountable technocrats in that un-elected soviet over in Brussels (oh, that's not socialist??) really works.
Also, thank you for calling me delusional and insane while not even having taken the time to understand my point and my reasoning. Gives those musings of yours (as well as yourself as a person) a lot more credibility :)
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
If you think the UK is socialist then you are clearly delusional. If that hurts your feelings, so be it. It's simply a fact as the UK is clearly not socialist.
Just because it's expensive to currently govern society, doesn't mean we should abandon the governance of society or hand over over direct control to those with the most wealth. If it cost 70% of GDP to sufficiently support society then anything less than that would see society deteriorate.
My argument is that people shouldn't pay any taxes anyway. Businesses should pay those taxes directly instead of palming them off to employees and customers. Those that earn the most from every $1 spent should have the highest tax rates.
Why are you against that? Why should those making money from the least effort have lower or similar tax rates to those who making money from the most effort? If you have two workers the same age doing the exact same job and one is extremely lazy and the other is a proper hard worker, would you say they should be paid the same amount?
Edit: In response toy your edit.
Yes, both those things are very efficient and useful. For example, look how much the UK spends on healthcare per person compared to the US. The NHS is absurdly more efficient despite the Tories efforts to get rid of it. As for social housing, just look at what's happened in the UK since Thatcher sold off social housing and never replaced it. Now people can't afford to buy homes and rent prices are getting out of hand. More social housing is precisely what the UK needs right now. That doesn't make them socialist though.
Socialism is about the relationship to the means of production, not health care, housing or welfare benefits. Under socialism, workers control the means of production and get a fair share of the profits dependant upon the amount and type of labour they perform.
A good example of socialism would be mining bitcoin at a pool. All the workers get a fair share of the rewards proportional to the amount of work they do. Some workers do more work than others and therefore get a greater share than others. Imagine if it was based on capitalist redistribution, the pool owner would keep most of the rewards for themselves.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit