[lbo-talk] going galt

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Mon Jun 21 10:26:49 PDT 2010


Shag: "has anyone ever 'followed' around an ordinary person and looked at the things she does every day that are underwritten by taxes to analyze how much she pays in taxes and how much she gets back?"

[WS:] The problem with this approach is that the "value" i.e. price of a particular service depends on the system under which it is produced. That is, childcare, schooling or health care produced under an entirely public system have a very different price than similar services produced under the private ownership - as evidenced by differences in health care cost or schooling cost between the US and Europe.

One way of looking at the value of government services is to compare what it would cost to live a decent life under a system with no functioning government, such as Somalia. Based on that, most Americans get a real bargain for the taxes they pay.

The problems that most Americans have is that they are no Newtons. Newton realized that he could see farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Most Americans are oblivious to that - these nullities imagine that they have standards of living never before achieved because they individually and singlehandedly produced them - and they would have even more if it were not for the tax "burden."

Wojtek

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 9:24 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:


> At 01:56 PM 6/16/2010, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> It boggles the mind. Many of my students, most of whom will soon be
>> people
>> complaining about high taxes and getting nothing for them have absolutely
>> no
>> idea what people get for their taxes. They can't even bring to mind
>> roads,
>> road maintenance and snow/flood/etc. clearance, airports, DMVs, truck and
>> rail transportation regulations, inspections and enforcement; parks,
>> recreation programs, park maintenance and natural resources enforcement;
>> schools (K-6, 7-9, 10-12, community colleges, public universities,
>> teachers,
>> faculty, administrators, building and grounds maintenance), libraries and
>> museums; police, fire, EMTs, public defense, judges, courts, jails, and
>> parole officers - much less army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard,
>> national guard, FBI, CIA, School of the Americas and veterans affairs
>> (from
>> VA Hospitals to the GI Bill); public health responses, assessment,
>> anticipation, doctors, nurses, hospitals; water treatment and delivery,
>> sewage collection and treatment, electrical generation and/or regulation,
>> waste collection and disposal, and all manner of pollution testing and
>> enforcement; communications infrastructures, development and regulation;
>> labor law and occupational safety and health regulation and enforcement -
>> much less the bureaucracies and personnel that provide unemployment
>> insurance and welfare programs; (what was supposed to be) banking and
>> financial regulation, enforcement and insurance, much less savings and
>> checking account protections and, most important, all the ways these
>> things
>> feed back on one another - when done properly - to produce the more or
>> less
>> reliable and high standard of living comfortable people experience... AND,
>> they have no understanding of how hard working, understaffed and deserving
>> of decent salaries, benefits and better working conditions public
>> employees
>> are (despite the fact that many of them are the children of such people -
>> though, to be honest, state workers in MI are often whiny about taxes and
>> point fingers at other lateral and lower (rather than higher-level) state
>> employees, too.
>>
>
> no shit. On the facebook page for a local alt rag, we were having a
> discussion about the need for bike lanes and better bike parking in the
> area. Some guy pipes up to say that when the bikers are willing to pay for
> it, he'll support it too. since FB isn't a place where it's worth my time to
> argue, I shut up but I wanted to ask him about all the stuff he gets for his
> taxes that he might take advantage of more than others. Or all the things
> taxes pay for that he doesn't take advantage of at all, but which ultimately
> make others' *and* his life better.
>
> has anyone ever 'followed' around an ordinary person and looked at the
> things she does every day that are underwritten by taxes to analyze how much
> she pays in taxes and how much she gets back?
>
>
>
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>



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