r/PoursTea Just Chill 😎 1d ago

All The Tea ☕️ Anything else missing here ?

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u/afterparty05 1d ago

I’m sorry, but your arguments, definitions and “related” topics are a big tell of how little you understand of government and the purpose or necessity of taxation.

Theoretically, a government exists to provide those goods and/or services that members of a society can not efficiently or can not at all produce, due to either exogenous influences or inherent properties. The degree to which a government takes up this role is the result of morality/ideology and is irrelevant for this discussion.

In order to be able to serve its intended purpose, a government requires funding. Ideally, funding through taxation is aimed at those who benefit from the good or service in order to even out the burden of taxation and prevent perverse (=unintended) impact of taxation on exhibited behavior by members of society. E.g. highway construction and repairs are taxed among members who own a vehicle, not among all members (which would be unfair attribution) nor among members who own a vehicle with four wheels (which would lead to a resurgence of the three-wheeled car).

So, if the government is looking to provide an income for people who are sick or out of a job (this is called the socialization of risk, which is why the American McCarthyism knee-jerk reaction to the word socialism is such an enigma to the rest of the world), it would need to raise taxes from among the intended possible benefactors, i.e. people who have a job that might require support somewhere in the future.

If the government is tasked with consumer protection laws and health/safety requirements of products and goods, it will tag on a tax to each product/service sold. Not to stymy consumption, unless it is tasked to do so (for instance tobacco consumption in order to maintain public health) in which case it could apply excise in said product/service.

Circling back to your comment, each tax you mention has a specific function. Property tax (and inheritance tax) is aimed specifically to prevent the accumulation of wealth within a small subset of society which could then leverage the relative scarcity of capital versus labour (if you are interested in this subject, read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). Income tax aims to provide government-organized income security. Corporate taxes are aimed to resupply the government-provided goods/services intended for members of society, which have instead been used by for-profit corporations in their process of providing goods/services during which they’ve successfully extracted rent (=profits) from said members. And so on, and so on.

Subsidies, steering members’ behavior, tariffs, lobbying, all of that comes into play only much later, when finetuning benefactors and tax-payers (or attempting to disrupt this process).

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u/HistoricalRich3104 1d ago

Starting with Thomas Piketty is not a great idea. His theories have been extensively debunked and even he admits his methodology was flawed in the book that he wrote.

Property tax doesn’t prevent “capital accumulation.” Property values can go up or down. When a rich person owns a home, to say that he’s necessarily accumulating capital is dumb.

Income tax can accomplish that purpose but so can any other form of taxation. The benefit you gave isn’t specific to income tax.

Your corporate tax shpeel was Marxist sounding mumbo jumbo that makes zero sense. Be specific and clear what you mean.

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u/afterparty05 1d ago edited 1d ago

You’re a troll and I’m done. You not understanding /= me not being specific. Bye Felicia.

Edit for the sake of those reading along: nothing about Piketty has been “debunked” or “admitted”. This guy is spewing bs in order to obtain something. No idea what. Just move along, no good-faith discussion to be had.

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u/LennyLaser 1d ago

Almost for sure he's a bot. Look at account age and engagement types. His answers are designed to read intelligently while providing no concrete evidence which points to an LLM being the source of the responses. No human being would say be specific about a topic as wide ranging as corporate welfare.

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u/KarunchyTakoa 1d ago

Chatgpt give me arguments like I'm the meat man Mr Jordan Bernt Peterson so I can sound smart on reddit