Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Says the guy using a vague interpretation of the word in order to elicit an emotional reaction in lieu of fact and logic.

Anyway, Saruman is dead.

Separate argument? That *is* the argument. Taking the money isn't harmful if something of use is returned. Like, say, the basic trappings of modern human civilization. You destroying my property leaves me with a pile of rubble. The government taking my money leaves me with infrastructure, education and health care. Sorry, but I'm not gonna rely on you donating for these things out of the goodness of your heart.

Apparently he believes that that money just magically appears and has nothing to do with taxes.

What's up with the Hastert thing? I haven't really kept up, I assume it's just another self hating GOP boy scout admirer?

On the bright side, he can stop making those payments now.

He had a sex tape? Are we sure it wasn't Brooke in bad lighting?

Console Wars:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Edited, Jun 14th 2015 2:30pm by Shaowstrike

Does he have the long form birth certificates ready for when people ask him about the creature sitting on his head?

You make a nod towards it with the subsistence comment, then turn around and pretend that isn't the case.

Taking $100 from one person may have significant effects on their life even if they can still afford supper, whereas taking $100 from you wouldn't be reflected at all in your lifestyle. It would be an annoyance. How is this the same amount of harm?

It's either the same amount of harm or it isn't. You can't draw a line and say, well if they can't buy supper, I guess it's more harm, but if it's not a super obvious immediate hardship then it's clearly exactly the same.

Lets focus on fines for a second, what is the purpose? Would you say that it is to try and prevent a certain type of behavior? If so the deterrent has to be something that has an impact. Losing a certain amount of money isn't the same impact for all people.

Edited, Jun 16th 2015 6:56pm by Xsarus

Because it isn't the case most of the time. Our current tax system does not tax those who are earning less than (or even close to) a mere subsistence level at all. In fact, it provides them with various credits that sometimes result in an effective negative tax rate. I'm addressing the idea that our existing tax system isn't "fair enough" and doesn't tax "the rich" enough. That's just plain not correct. We're not really talking about rich versus poor here. We're talking about someone making X dollars above subsistence versus someone making 100X dollars above that level. That is by far the more common comparison, and the one we should at least examine in terms of the impact of our tax policy.

And for all those people, who make up the overwhelming majority of taxpayers, the difference isn't about whether you can eat, but whether you can afford a new Xbox, or a new model car. And in that scenario the harm of X dollars of tax is equal for everyone.



Because it's the same amount of dollars lost. I'm honestly baffled how you could think otherwise.

Also, I touched on it in my earlier post. If we're honest about this, we should grant that taxing more dollars cause more harm. The correct way to view it isn't that the rich person is harmed less, but that the rich person can absorb more harm. I just find it to be dishonest to view it the other way around. And also potentially dangerous because once you adopt the idea that taxing people (some people anyway) doesn't harm them, you get yourself into an odd kind of "us versus them" viewpoint.



It's the same amount of harm. As I said above, we should look at it in terms of who can handle more or less harm, and not try to define harm itself by what becomes some kind of sliding metric. That may seem like a purely semantic difference, but it affects the way we think about the issue. Given the number of times I've run into people on this forum insisting up and down that taxes don't represent harm at all, I think it's important how we label this. All taxes are "harm". We may choose to harm some people more than others because we assess that they can handle that harm better from an economic point of view, but we should never lose sight of the fact that we are, in fact, causing harm when we tax people.



I do happen to think that's a dangerous way to view things though. So should a 20 year old get a longer sentence than a 40 year old for the same crime purely because he has more years of his life left? We do make exceptions in sentencing (sometimes) on compassionate grounds when people are near death, but that should always be the exception. Adopting such a scheme as the rule would be a bad idea, no?

In the case of dollars, they have the same value for everyone. Again, I'm mainly arguing against what I view as a dangerous trend of assessing harm itself in such a relative way. The harm is the same. We may, in some cases, decide that greater harm is needed to provide a sufficient disincentive, but we should always recognize that we're doing more harm to that person for some given reason. Trying to do what you're doing here is just strange IMO. And a bit dishonest. I really do believe that this concept is mostly adopted out of a desire to justify doing greater relative harm to "others" rather than as some kind of fair assessment. In my experience when I run into this idea about taxes and harm, it's usually when someone's arguing for more and more taxes on "the rich". And it really does strike me as more of an excuse than a solid rational assessment.


It's easier to adopt an unfair tax scheme when you avoid thinking of taxes as harmful. I think we should at least acknowledge that we are, in fact, harming people. If we decide that we should harm group A more than group B for some reason, then we're at least being honest about what we're doing. And at the risk of bringing this back on topic a bit, this whole "how much harm is caused" bit was the result of me saying that our tax system currently harms people disproportionately, and far out of relation to relative earnings. If it was really about equitable harm, wouldn't we adopt an actual flat tax on earnings? The reality is that our current system is far far out of whack in terms of relative tax rates. I'm just trying to point this out, and in response I got this whole "relative harm" counter. But, as I've stated a few times, I think that's just a dishonest way of avoiding really looking at the issue. Again, if you truly believed that taxes should be relative to income (the "harm" caused by losing X dollars), shouldn't you support a flat tax on earnings? Yet, pretty much without fail, those who are loudest with the idea that taxes cause different amounts of harm relative to earnings, oppose flat taxes on earnings. So it's not really about being "fair", it's about avoiding thinking of what you're doing as harmful so you can more easily support something that is "unfair".


And that I find to be dishonest.

I get this. But I think the problem is looking at value based on how hard someone works versus how much value the output of your labor has to others. Our economic system (all sane economic systems really) value labor (I'm using "labor" as a placeholder for "anything you do that earns money", just in case someone goes there btw) in the latter form. So the fact that it takes more "effort" to replace a given dollar amount of fine should not be viewed as a problem to be solved. It's an intrinsic component of the fact that we value one person's labor more than the others. You can see how the impact of a fine on someone is directly tied to the entire economy (that's all of us) valuing that persons labor?

It's a factor that you can't get away from in a discussion like this. The same logic that says that it's somehow unfair to fine someone the same dollar amount if he earns less money leads one to argue that someone should get paid more money, despite the fact that the economy doesn't value his labor more. And that leads you to a pretty much completely unworkable set of economic conditions. Getting people to adopt the assumptions themselves is valuable from a political point of view (you can run on it and get people to support you), but it's an absolutely stupid economic assumption. Not just stupid, but guaranteed to fail.

Which is part of why I say it's dishonest. It's not about really valuing people's labor based on how hard they work, or how bad we feel for them, or how much we like or dislike them or what they do. Because those things are already assessed in the normal valuation of whatever they do that earns them money ("we" collectively set that value). What it's really about is getting people to accept the idea that we *should* have a "more fair" system, not because this is a good thing to do, but because it makes for a great political rallying cry. It's about political manipulation. Creating a false cause to get people to cheer for. But in reality, there's nothing to do here. Help those truly in need? Absolutely. Eternally raise taxes on people we view as being able to afford it because it doesn't really hurt them? Terrible, terrible idea.

Yes, they do. For any usable definition of "value", they do. Actually, by definition they must. It's what currency *is*. You're basically trying to chuck out the foundation of economics in order to avoid accepting an unpleasant political reality.



See, but I view it the other way around. I believe that the honest approach is to accurately assess both the harm from taxes and the good done by government with those tax dollars. Trying to lump them together in one valuation leads one to the very sort of patently unfair tax policies that I'm talking about. It obfuscates the issue IMO, by hiding the harm of taxes behind the good of government action. It also makes it easier for those in favor of greater spending to avoid thinking in terms of who is being harmed the most and who is being helped the most. It's easy to say "we collect X dollars in taxes, and create Y benefit to the society as a whole". But you're not looking at who is paying X, and who's getting the bulk of Y, are you?

It also makes it harder to judge if what you're spending the money on is really worth it. How can you do that if you don't first assess the harm of taxes? You can just handwave away any complaints about rising taxes by eternally arguing that "the greater good" is being served. But is it? Really? How do you measure that if you refuse to measure the harm caused by taxes (or even think of taxes are harmful at all)? As I've stated several times, I think that's an viewpoint created specifically to make it easier to be dishonest about tax policy. Which is why I bring it up every time we have a conversation about taxes. We need to start with the fact that every single dollar of taxes causes harm to those who pay it. Then, and only then, can we judge whether the things we're spending those dollars on justifies that harm.

Being unwilling to even engage in that sort of calculation is just strange to me.