Comment by dennis_jeeves1
3 years ago
>The US was practically founded on principle of refusal to pay unfair taxes
What exactly is a fair tax?
3 years ago
>The US was practically founded on principle of refusal to pay unfair taxes
What exactly is a fair tax?
By the founders definitions? At least 90 percent of the taxes we pay are not fair.
What percentage of the services provided by today's government were not around at the founding?
I'd very much like to see government downsize, but if you want to pay taxes at the level at which the country was founded, you also have to restrict government activity to that level.
Not sure if that is tenable.
I was thinking more along lines of 100% ... But hey, point taken taken, we are generally in agreement.
Any tax others have to pay, that I don't.
Whatever the consensus is.
Good, let tax some minority/marginalized section of the society so that their living becomes hell.
No tax is fair. They're all involuntary transactions.
The US is the textbook experiment which proves that even minarchy (a minimal government) can't work.
All form of governments, no matter how small, tend to grow into huge socialist monsters (the usa is the largest employer in the world, second only to China, maybe).
Even if that very first government was founded on not collecting very little taxes for this very reason.
> All form of governments, no matter how small, tend to grow into huge socialist monsters (the usa is the largest employer in the world, second only to China, maybe).
The USA have 330 million citizens and 10 million people without valid residency, in total something around 340 million citizens. The public sector clocks in at 15%, which includes the military and USPS. That is, seriously, not much.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/public-servi...
U.S. total public spending is around 40% of the GDP. [1]
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
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It's sort of like how when developers learn how much they cost the company per hour and they get mad about how they don't get to take more of that home.
Well, say you work at a company with 100 developers. That's who's making the stuff. Everybody else is there to make sure the stuff gets made. There's a manager for every 6-8 developers (13-17), and there's a couple managers for those managers. Add in HR and you're already up to about a 25% overhead and we haven't talked about equipment and buildings and customer management and advertising and litigation and taxes and so on and so forth.