• SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    That’s the point. A country that is not constrained by resources, labor and technology should never have to go through this. There is nothing stopping the Federal Government from handing out generous grants to improve the infrastructure of states/cities/towns.

    Taxes serve the purpose of changing behavior (penalty for smoking, for example, or to encourage the adoption of environmentally friendly technology) and reducing wealth inequality (taxing land, rich people, corporations), but these taxes are not used to pay for the good stuff. You don’t tax billionaires to fund government spending, you tax them because you can and you don’t want a small group of people to hold disproportionate amount of wealth.

    • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      that failure of the federal government has nothing to do with what i was talking about.

      on a local level the local taxes we all pay are directly in the budget for that spending. we literally vote on 0.025% property tax increases to pay for specific local projects.

      “taxes do not fund government spending” is literally false for entities that don’t control the currency or those resources.

      • moujikman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Modern Monetary Theory. From an purely economic perspective, SimulatedLiberalism is right.

        Think of taxes as an olympic sized swimming pool, a politician may say they are raising taxes to dump a new bucket of water into the pool, but some guy comes around once a month to drain or fill the pool so it always stays level.