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fair share?
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Why is it assumed that if the government has more money, then things will be better?
The government is filled with inefficiency that will just be made worse by throwing more money at the issue. Americans are not getting value out of their taxes.
Americans have record low confidence in congress and many officials in government (Supreme Court). Why would we give them more money when they, congress in particular, is responsible for setting the budget?
Why would we give them more? Oh damn, are you a billionaire?
Should billionaires make as much as they do? No
However just taxing them doesn't get rid of the root issue. It just addresses a symptom.
We should break up the companies that enable billionaires to exist, stimulate competition, raise the minimum wage, put bounds on CEO bonuses, and limit executive pay to a reasonable ratio when compared to the lowest paid worker in the corporation.
The reason for a tax isn't to give the government money to spend, it already has the ability to spend infinite money for all intents and purposes. The taxation is there to destroy some part of that money to sort of balance the money supply after the fact.
This way of thinking about tax also makes very obvious that taxing income might make the least amount of sense and taxing wealt and transactions, probably is the more reasonable way to go.
The government in the us is obviously innefective but it's not going to get better by withholding it's spending money, in fact I'm fairly certain that for almost all government agencies in the US the requirements the law asks of them are largely impossible to hit on their current budget. Sure maybe the regulation could be easier and the oversight requirements less strict, but reducing the budget (except for military and police) wouldn't help any of the problems that exist when interfacing with these government agencies today, it'd just make them worse
There's also the fact that Americans have record low confidence in the government as a direct result of the actions of the people who give their billionaire friends tax cuts year after year and make it up by raising taxes for everybody else.