Comment by tonymet
1 day ago
if spending is 90% lower than today, coming up with revenue is trivial.
Until 16th amendment, Federal revenue was from excise tax. Income, fees, capital gains were not necessary.
So degree matters. Of course you're going to have to keep inventing new tax revenue streams if spending is 6-10x more than it should be.
We may keep the property tax, but talking about tax revenue absent of spending is like talking about how to deal with a headache caused by a nail in the head, without addressing the nail.
Sounds like we agree. Parent said this:
> Focus on the spending first, and make sure it's essential. Then figure out how to fund it.
Which is what I disagreed with. There is no "sequence" to this where one comes first. You need to look at both in parallel. Its entirely possible that one could be more troublesome than another, but you still need to look at both!
sure but here's what happens in practice. The agency raises the revenue, and raises the spending to meet the new revenue.
I'll give an example. My local city proposed creating a separate taxing authority for the fire department . The new authority would get an additional share of the property tax. Meanwhile the city would keep the share they were getting beforehand, and spend it on other things.
My point is that abstract / theoretical approaches to taxing don't account for the human factor. The human factor is that people just want to make their job easy, and if they get more money, they will spend it.