What I think about taxes

RedRocket said:

Fenderbender123 said:

RedRocket said:

AZDuck said:

GrundleStiltzkin said:

AZDuck said:

GrundleStiltzkin said:

AZDuck said:

GrundleStiltzkin said:

AZDuck said:

Fenderbender123 said:

2001400ex said:

oregonblitzkrieg said:

Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.

Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.

Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?

Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods? If so, kill your face with a rusty cheese grater in the ass. If you're trolling, well done.

Education of any level is a legitimate private good. Coercive force is not.

Gotta disagree. Education makes the pack (flock?) smarter and better. Also keeps the little hoodlums off the streets. Show me a country with an entirely private educational system and I'll show you sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle Ages.

Perhaps we crossed terms. I meantt good as in goods & services. No question that broadly available public education is a societal good. Compulsory, publicly funded education is probably on balance a good thing(tm). Could also be the largest corporate welfare program in history.

I do think "primary education and public safety" is a false equivalency.

It's more fun when I'm not arguing with GoebbelsDuck.

I would posit that an educated society is as important to public safety, if not more so, than the police and fire departments combined.

I've more thoughts than willing type on phone.

Seems to be a fundamental theme of most people of good will along spectrum. We? basically want the same good things in life for another. The difference is the means by which to affect those outcomes. To be even more reductive: what are the things I would convince my neighbor to do, and what are the things I'd command him to do at gunpoint.

Alright, so I'm seeing "command him to do at gunpoint," and I'm interpreting that as "taxes," because my experience of libertarian cosmology is that taxes are forcibly taken from the taxpayer either by coercion or the threat of coercion or actual force.

Again, I would argue that a democratic system, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, serves as the means of convincing my neighbors. To do otherwise would be to have a system of voluntary contributions to pay for the good in question (public education), which leads us to the good old "free rider" problem or the "tragedy of the commons." But if we reduce education as a good to be received only by those whose parents pay for it, we're back in private-education land which is worse for all of us. (See, e.g. Liberia, 19th century America, other places where the overall life expectancy is somewhere between 35-50).

Put another way, "taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society." I didn't come up with that, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.

The libertarian ethos is really attractive and tempting because its logic is simple and elegant - you put in what you take out. But the world as we know it is strewn with cases where it isn't that simple.

There are no free markets for house fires, muggings, terrorist bombings, and cancer. Those are just bad things that happen to some people and not to others. But the overwhelming majority of Americans would readily agree that we should pay taxes for firemen, policemen, armed forces, and a lesser proportion who would agree that we should pay taxes to subsidize health care, because we? (society) as a whole benefit(s). Again, I think schools go in that list as well.

Democracy is the least bad way of paying for these goods - everyone has an interest, therefore everyone pays. If taxes get too high - the peasants revolt. Too low, the government either fails to function effectively or it borrows itself into oblivion. Also, history has shown that high levels of income inequality correlate strongly with corruption and societal violence.

The Scandinavian countries were among the world's poorest in the 19th century, but the overall levels of income inequality were relatively low for the time. Thus, Scandinavia sent millions of immigrants to America and Canada and also maintained strong levels of societal cohesion. When Scandinavia became wealthy, the levels of inequality remained low, and thus those countries do really well on indices of crime, public safety, health, and educational attainment. Finland is generally regarded as having the best primary school system in the world. Their system is entirely-state-run, to include subsidized meals for all students, and begins with pre-K and goes through college. Life expectancy is 84 for women and 78 for men.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with extraordinarily high levels of income inequality. 90% of Haiti's schools are non-public, corruption is high, and literacy is around 60%. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere. Life expectancy at birth is about 63.

Without a strong public school system, I believe America is well on its way to becoming Brazil with nukes. But I also think there is still time to fix the problem.

Fenderbender123 said:

TurdBuffer said:

There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.

What if I said that if helping poor kids get an education was important to you, that you are free to open up your wallet and help pay for it? And what if I said you could have more money to pay for it if you weren't taxed for it in the first place?

I would tell you not to phrase your shitty hypothetical question like a Morpheus meme.

So what you're saying is that I got my point across, but because there's no way to argue my point, the best course of action is to attack the way I chose to get my point across.

What if I told you that the pros and cons of public ed had already been discussed in this thread ad nauseam?

BennyBeaver said:

Fenderbender123 said:

AZDuck said:

Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods?

No, I don't think they are private services. I'm saying they could be. Hondo's comment implied that there is no other way to pay for these services other than taxes, which is incorrect.

I guess it's hard for people to imagine a society where people were actually free to make their own choices on how to protect themselves, and how their children will be spending 15,000+ hours of their childhood development, so they just go along with the one-size-fits-all model we have going on, and assume that if it's taken away, there would suddenly be no such thing as safety or education anymore.

Today's public education (in Seattle at least) is in no way a "one-size-fits-all model." Public education in bumfuck areas might be, but they don't usually have a private option except for homeschool.

TurdBuffer said:

2001400ex said:

PurpleThrobber said:

2001400ex said:

oregonblitzkrieg said:

2001400ex said:

oregonblitzkrieg said:

AZDuck said:

HE HAD A CONTRACT!

Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.

Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.

Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?

If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.

Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?

The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.

Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.

As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.

Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.

Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.

Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.

salemcoog said:

TurdBuffer said:

Fenderbender123 said:

2001400ex said:

oregonblitzkrieg said:

Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.

Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.

Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?

There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.

I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.

And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.

The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.

My kids go to public schools, my oldest scored in the 99th percentile on every college placement test she took, and thanks to that saved me a shitload of tuition money at her out-of-state college. My younger kid is a 3.6-3.8 kid and got perfect math scores that placed him in pre-Calc as a Frosh. It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.