About taxes

Post Reply New Topic

My knowledge of European expenditures are limited but I assume just as the US they run a fairly significant deficit so that's on top of this oppressive taxation. Now I'm sure that are certain cutting measures that can be taken, the administration costs and waste are probably enough to make ones eyes bleed but it probably wouldn't be enough to cover the deficit let alone cut taxes. Something has to give.

It depends a bit on the country, Norway has what is called "oil corrected" which means that proceeds from the petroleum industry are used to cover the deficit, then anything left over from taxation is transferred into a sovereign wealth fund. Based on the last budget, every single citizen and company could be paying 0 taxes and there would still be a surplus.

Sweden are running a surplus, but they have a 7.9% overall unemployment rate and a 25% unemployment rate for people between 15 and 25. To this you can add students who'd rather be working, people on various benefits and so on. They are also running very high taxes,

Denmark are running a surplus as well but taxation is very high. it amounts to about 49% of GDP not counting ownership taxes and I bet it doesn't include indirect taxes either.

Both Sweden and Denmark also have issues with national debt and all 3 scandinavian countries are having or are going ot have issues related to their welfare states if current immigration policies, work policies and such are maintained.

The core problem is that governments have no incentive to cut spending because if it means losing public jobs that will not be replaced by private sector job they erode the tax payer base as well as make themselves liable to pay for social benefits for the same person. When you add that in many European countries, a public sector job pays more or less the same as a private sector job, with more benefits (time off, pension, sick days, less overtime etc) in addition to better work hours, less performance pressure, and less measurable performance requirements, you're left with a situation where the government has no reason to cut in the public sector (as long as the taxes can be raised more to pay for it) and the public sector employees have no incentive to look for employment in the private sector.

I wish there was a way to show people all of the taxes the pay. I don't think it would necessarily mean that they would want to cut their taxes drastically. There are many important civic structures that are worth are investments, libraries and open public spaces, parks that service the community, restoring the health of nearby ecosystems that have been destroyed by development, etc.

You can see those results immediately. The taxes that go to fund education however are immoral. Results aren't tied to funding, as they should be, and the waist is embarrassing, lost in the bureaucracy. That we spend 800 billion on it, the results should then be astronomical, I'm not even for cutting that 800 billion if it was spent well because the return would be amazing. But clarifying where our money is going and being able to see the results of that would allow us to change the orthodoxy who are an impediment to progress.

I am curious about German and Sweden. They are models worth studying, and if California is going to be a progressive state, they better learn how to do it right.

Feudal Serfs paid only 20 percent tax.

ruveyn

@Ruveyn and MarketAndChurch, it's a very clever trick though by Government to require someone who is anal enough about his money to sit down and calculate the exact amount of his income/wealth that went to the government to be incinerated. If people got 56% income tax, but nothing else, they'd go ballistic, but if they pay 30% income tax, then 10% VAT, then a small mandatory fee here, some special fees there, then its not as painful or noticeable.

If the cost of such taxes was actually done as well, as in how much private sector activity do they squash, I'm fairly certain we would come to a very different place on the laffer curve.

I'm not fundamentally against taxes, I'm fundamentally against wasting money, If the government gets $500.000 worth of services out of $1.000.000 then there is a distinct problem. Sure we can talk about Keynesian multipliers on government spending, but while much of Keynes theory holds in certain markets under certain conditions, the multipliers are often overstated by people who are in favor of government spending. Furthermore,studies into the opportunity cost of such spending is rarely done, at least not properly.

500k worth of services for 1000k is a good deal if it puts people to work who could not make it in the private sector.

Obviously you don't live in the US so the situation is probably a bit different in your country. People who whine about paying taxes in the US are mostly scrooges. Our taxes are no-where near that. Our corporate taxes are too high but on the whole taxes are too low for the amount of services people demand from government (even though they may take these services for granted because they aren't obvious to them). It's ridiculous that our president will only talk about raising taxes for people above the 250K mark, as if that will ever be enough.

Well that's exactly it. That was exactly the case in Wisconsin, the issue isn't to privatize those public sectors to save costs, or just cut at random to meet a specific budget, it is to destroy the selfish nature of certain aspects of the public sector so that it can run efficiently. It is not a public/private argument, it is a efficient public model versus an unnecessarily expensive public model.

Most of the school districts in the state are insured by a health insurance company owned and runned by the teachers unions, Scott Walker demanded that we not be hostage to an insurance company out union interests, who, because they have no competition, were allowed to overcharge the school districts whatever they please. They forced the teachers unions to open themselves up to the private market, instead of opting for the union-backed, and union-made insurance company whose been ripping them off for decades, and guess what: The teachers union-backed insurance company even lowered its own rates, dramatically, when competition was introduced into the picture.

I dont even mind cutting taxes if taxes were efficiently spent. My annoyance of those who want to increase taxes is that they seem to not have any interest in deregulating or decreasing some of inefficient workings of the system, so that taxes that are spent are spent well.

Well I think if we raised the middle class's taxes and all government at every level showed exactly where every dollar is spent in the public sector, we would be less willing to go to war or support Obamacare, or pass a medicare prescription plan for the elderly. Its this disconnect of the working class from how money is spent that gave reality to every policy government comes up with. If you saw the dollars attached to it, and the assumptions made, you wouldn't have billions of dollars thrown away at high speed rail in California.

Why is high speed vacuum tube trains a waste when it can go 4000 miles per hour with only 5 percent of the fuel costs of airplanes?

I suspect that this is intentional, I frequently read government budgets and compared to a corporate Q or A report they are hellish. The footnotes suck, they are full of questionable headings, few places if any say exactly where or to what purpose something is used. I mean if a corporation filed a report like the government does, the SEC would be so far up that corporations read end, that they could taste flop sweat and failure.

Because of the setup of people, and the wild assumptions assumed.

Blame liberty for the way people have chosen to live, but California does not have the population, population density, or population distribution to make it workable.

One must ask, where will the ridership come from? Where will the frequent riders who will use it to get from say Bakersfield to Fresno come from to sustain the daily ridership of the train? Who works in LA that will want to spend a plane trip's worth every day and two times the time for the convenience(?) of riding a train to SF? What cities exist in the center of the track that will act as a magnet to draw traffic from both ends of the line? And most importantly, where will the train get the type of ridership it needs to justify the costs of running a high-speed train -- if the ridership slows and remains in the slump it will be in, they cannot justify zipping 25 people from one end of the line to the other at 4000 mph, it will inevitbly slow down so to match energy costs. The subsidy per passenger mile will be unmatched, even by the most expensive and wasteful public transportation systems that currently exist.

Yes, more so emotional then anything, I certainly don't think its workable, but infographics are digestible and if most people have access to it. People would see the budget, and not have to put up with hundreds of millions of excel spreadsheets. I heard someone throw 100 million out as a number, I don't know if that is accurate, but if so, it would be the best 100 million that the government could possibly spend to illustrate its inner workings, with only the most relevant information available just by clicking through the representative charts. Currently, the wall that exists between the laymen and their ability to comprehend the data puts their ignorance hostage to interpreters with an agenda.

As a meritocrat/technocrat I do not hold the "public" in high esteem, I always found it somewhat strange that one would place such high faith in an average group making above average decisions. However, economics at this stage is so complex that I can go on for hours without the average person understanding half of what I say if I elect to use the correct terms. If GE can produce an easy to read, understandable annual report every year as a multi-national conglomerate with numerous minority interests and subsidiaries, without going into the 100.000.0000 range, then teh government should be able to do so as well. Then again, I'm not surprised that it would cause enormous strain and cost mountains of cash for the government to do what most corporations are required to do by government every year.

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
H. L. Mencken

Getting less than what you pay for is never a good deal. Would you consider it a good deal to get half a big mac for the price of a full one because the guy who made it was mentally handicapped?

The vacuum train was invented in 1910 by Goddard who realized that the train will be coasting in space most of the time so it won't be using any energy even if it is traveling at fantastic speeds. However mediocre minds will never believe the fantastic claims of this technology because of the limitation of their minds.