If we’re going to be able to have properly funded public services, then we all need to pay our fair share.
This is where all discussions around taxation go south. Tax collections cannot “fund” anything at the federal level, and never did. A tax levy’s original purpose is to create a need for the currency the issuing government creates at will in the economy, by force if necessary. Until everyone can satisfy their tax obligation they are essentially unemployed, which draws resources and labor to the government sector as it requires in provisioning itself.
The actual provisioning of the government is always accomplished with new currency creation, or there is no currency in the system to collect. Taxes then become inflation control and a means of accomplishing social goals in re-distribution. The currency-issuing government never “needs” our currency to spend, but it does need us to need its currency and to occasionally have less of it. Given that the government must spend into the economy before there is currency to collect or borrow it is more accurate to state that spending “funds” both than the other way around.
If we want to see the wealthiest people pay what they should, then we need to be reading any claims about taxes with a critical eye. Take the time to do some of the math; it’s not hard.
I fully agree with this. We should be cautious not to allow wealth accumulation that threatens our democratic process. The wealthy understand money and will, if left unsupervised, use their money to redirect flows of public spending away from the public purpose and to their profits if they are allowed access to our government. This is called neoliberalism, and we are currently in it up to our eyeballs in the US with signs of its spreading rapidly.
Trickle-down economics is the result of the false belief that business and banking make our money, and that our government is a cost/drain from their productivity when the truth is the opposite. Any spending on public purpose investment is met immediately with a demand that we show how we will “pay for” it from the perspective of the government’s balance sheet and not the general economy. Most modern nations use a fiat currency system which means they can “afford” anything that is available and for sale priced in the currency the government creates at will.
We should make sure the wealthy pay their “fair share”, but we must never make spending on investments in our society’s future provisional on that. They are not connected. We will find that once the wealthy are made irrelevant to any such investments their tax rates will suddenly become much higher just because they make too damn much money. Money is a product of law and government and never did grow on rich people. Any misery that can effectively be mitigated with new money creation is entirely a political decision, not economics, even if we stopped collecting taxes entirely.
