Tax cuts are old and outdated -Swedish finance minister.

[Kryos]

When politicians finally learn? Politics are local rules, big companies act on a global level. To make companies to stuff, it needs to be attractive for the company or you need to have ways to implement the rules on a global level. If you punish to much, they just move away.

[Deleted]

The government already gets 50% of what you earn, wants even more and swedes still like it ? No wonder why the stockholm syndrome has this name

If a swede works, let's say, 300 days per year, then half of this (150 days) is given to the government through coercion. So basically you are a slave of the government, congratulations !!

Sweden has one of the highest standards of living so I am pretty sure they like it.

And your conclusion is ridiculous. You can choose not to work.

Also your taxes are not taken so that the government can party, you are paying taxes so your kids can get good education, infrastructure can be built and maintained, jobs created, health taken care of etc

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When politicians finally learn? Politics are local rules, big companies act on a global level. To make companies to stuff, it needs to be attractive for the company or you need to have ways to implement the rules on a global level. If you punish to much, they just move away.

Do you understand that income tax and corporate tax are completely different things?

And that there are ongoing efforts to regulate corporate tax on a cross-country level and make it harder to evade taxes?

[alexw]

Krugman, for one. His position is literally that we'd be better off spending money on things that are completely useless than not spending the money at all.

To be clear, your summary is not quite what I've said - I'm saying that it's not just that it should preferentially be spent on useful things, but that if you can't find anything useful to spend it on, multiplier effects are insufficiently clear to justify spending. In other words, you'd better have a clear indication that you're buying something useful before I allocate funds.

Those arguing (me being one of them) that useless spending is better than no spending at all, mean this solely in the case of a lack of aggregate demand and thus when the economy is operating below capacity.

Thus if the economy is only operating at 80% of its potential capacity with 20% idle, you lose nothing if you put say a quarter of that idle capacity (5%) to use doing useless things. Because though that 5% will do noting useful themselves, their spending in turn will via multiplier effects, put a large portion of the remaining idle 15% to work doing useful things.

So its not something to be done normally, and useful spending is surely preferable (rebuilding run down infrastructure for example), but as a way to escape from a long term depressed economy, then yes do it. Getting out of such a situation matters more then anything else.

[Release]

Sweden has one of the highest standards of living so I am pretty sure they like it.

And your conclusion is ridiculous. You can choose not to work.

Also your taxes are not taken so that the government can party, you are paying taxes so your kids can get good education, infrastructure can be built and maintained, jobs created, health taken care of etc

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Do you understand that income tax and corporate tax are completely different things?

And that there are ongoing efforts to regulate corporate tax on a cross-country level and make it harder to evade taxes?

He also conveniently overlooks certain rights Swedes have such as maternity leave for both partners and holiday pay from companies subsidized by the government or a very robust welfare system if you lose your job. I'm not familiar with the workers rights of Brazil but I can't imagine they measure up to Sweden's.

Like spectral said I am happy to pay tax for a society that works. And as something which is frequently overlooked income tax is Progressive that means you only pay this 50% quoted if your earning good money at the higher end of the scale. A regular person pays around 30%.

[Deleted]

When politicians finally learn? Politics are local rules, big companies act on a global level. To make companies to stuff, it needs to be attractive for the company or you need to have ways to implement the rules on a global level. If you punish to much, they just move away.

Its not the politicians, its the big companies that make the rules. Taxes are basically theft and only there to keep the unwashed masses happy and prevent those annoying upstarts from catching up.

Ideally taxes shouldn't even exist or at the very least be only limited to army upkeep, cops and basic infrastructure.

[Barnabas]

I agree completely. I've long been in favor of a socialized, freely available public system in the United States.

The problem is the government won't manage it very well and everyones taxes will be at sweden levels. Very few want that. Sweden will give you what you want but you'll be back in the US before too long.

[igualitarist]

You are not paying 50% into the ether you realise this? You are paying for things that you use as a citizen such Roads, Police, Environmental Protection, Health if the tax is that high. The list goes on.

Not all your money is well spent and not all of it should be used the way it is but that's just basic human incompetence and corruption rather than the fundamental problems of tax.

I may be biased because i live in a corruption infested shithole where we work our asses off and receive terrible public services, where the public education is in the bottom of the education rankings, people die in the queue for public healthcare, the roads are full of holes and with terrible signaling and the police, along with the Judiciary are extremely inefficient (die more people here victims of violence than in all the wars happening in the world right now combined, and only 3% of the cases are solved). On the other hand, private services are great.

To make things worse, every day explodes in the national media a corruption scandal involving politicians and bureaucrats getting filthy rich using public money.

And still, people here think the cause of our poverty is the evil capitalism and only the government can solve our problems, so they keep voting in politicians that promise to increase the government and thus, tax us even more.

All of the countries that are rich nowadays, achieved this status when they still had low taxes and small governments, and they are losing this. But hey, you/we get stuff for free so does not matter my country follows a recipe for the disaster.

[artemishunter1]

Frankly, I can't even understand the perspective of people that are super bent out of shape about this. OK, there's some waste and some things I'm not super happy about, that's valid. How does that go to being super angry about paying X% in taxes? Why would Y% be cool, but X% is just totally and obviously outrageous? I'm a lot more likely to look at the world around me and think, "am I getting my money's worth"? Well, the obvious answer is that yeah, modern life is fucking awesome and I wouldn't be in a position to earn what I do without having had access to great school and the massive tech sector that exists in no small part because of government investment and institutional stability.

Put another way, I like society and I'm fine with paying for one.

BUT YOU are not paying for one. Someone else is. YOU are too poor to pay for one. Someone earning more than YOU, is paying for one. It would be one thing if everyone paid the same. But everyone is not

[Spectral]

The problem is the government won't manage it very well and everyones taxes will be at sweden levels. Very few want that. Sweden will give you what you want but you'll be back in the US before too long.

What makes you say so? Relative to the risk pools of the insured populations, Medicare, Medicaid, and VA spending are all relatively unremarkable and function within the context of the current system.

[Release]

The problem is the government won't manage it very well and everyones taxes will be at sweden levels. Very few want that. Sweden will give you what you want but you'll be back in the US before too long.

We have the same thing here in England too and it's managed fairly effectively. Taxation is higher than the US but we aren't fucked over at every opportunity by insurance companies either. Give me the NHS over your system any day.

[Spectral]

BUT YOU are not paying for one. Someone else is. YOU are too poor to pay for one. Someone earning more than YOU, is paying for one. It would be one thing if everyone paid the same. But everyone is not

I'd have to go check the exact amount I paid this year, but it's higher than American median tax expenditure by a wide margin. Not only do I pay my proverbial "fair share", I heavily subsidize the system.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that I don't pay much in taxes.

[Masark]

Krugman, for one. His position is literally that we'd be better off spending money on things that are completely useless than not spending the money at all.

To be clear, your summary is not quite what I've said - I'm saying that it's not just that it should preferentially be spent on useful things, but that if you can't find anything useful to spend it on, multiplier effects are insufficiently clear to justify spending. In other words, you'd better have a clear indication that you're buying something useful before I allocate funds.

1. That's exactly what I meant by "if at all possible".

2. Yes, but there's absolutely no shortage of things that could use money. The infrastructure deficit in both your nation and mine is huge. And given my preference, I'd add a zero or two onto the NIH's and NSF's budgets.

[Release]

I may be biased because i live in a corruption infested shithole where we work our asses off and receive terrible public services, where the public education is in the bottom of the education rankings, people die in the queue for public healthcare, the roads are full of holes and with terrible signaling and the police, along with the Judiciary are extremely inefficient (die more people here victims of violence than in all the wars happening in the world right now combined, and only 3% of the cases are solved). On the other hand, private services are great.

To make things worse, every day explodes in the national media a corruption scandal involving politicians and bureaucrats getting filthy rich using public money.

And still, people here think the cause of our poverty is the evil capitalism and only the government can solve our problems, so they keep voting in politicians that promise to increase the government and thus, tax us even more.

All of the countries that are rich nowadays, achieved this status when they still had low taxes and small governments, and they are losing this. But hey, you/we get stuff for free so does not matter my country follows a recipe for the disaster.

I sort of feel for you. I too would be upset if I paid 100 dollars out of the 200 I earnt into the back pocket of some shady politician. We are talking about two different things though. In my view it's fine to pay high taxation if it's used properly and fairly on infrastructure, welfare, education etc.

The way out of your mess you describe with the roads, education is through taxation particularly of the cooperation's/rich so I admire Brazil but if the money from taxation isn't going where it should then that's a problem with the entire system.

[Spectral]

Those arguing (me being one of them) that useless spending is better than no spending at all, mean this solely in the case of a lack of aggregate demand and thus when the economy is operating below capacity.

Thus if the economy is only operating at 80% of its potential capacity with 20% idle, you lose nothing if you put say a quarter of that idle capacity (5%) to use doing useless things. Because though that 5% will do noting useful themselves, their spending in turn will via multiplier effects, put a large portion of the remaining idle 15% to work doing useful things.

So its not something to be done normally, and useful spending is surely preferable (rebuilding run down infrastructure for example), but as a way to escape from a long term depressed economy, then yes do it. Getting out of such a situation matters more then anything else.

I remain very skeptical of this position for reasons better explained by Arnold Kling than I; I can probably hunt down good written explanations without much work, but I suspect you're already familiar with the core position here, understand it, and disagree with it.

Aside from the object-level discussion of whether it's a good idea to engage in such spending even when there's nothing good to buy, my meta-level concern with be that conceding the point creates terrible incentives for those in power and that they'll put much less effort into spending constructively if given the green light to spend on any ol' thing than if there are strong demands for rigorous evidence that the spending will go into actually useful activities.

[Barnabas]

What makes you say so? Relative to the risk pools of the insured populations, Medicare, Medicaid, and VA spending are all relatively unremarkable and function within the context of the current system.

simply because you have potential to make more money in the us. case in point what we have now isn't managed well. we have a chance to make good reforms next year to replace aca. we need to do things like allow medicare to negotiate drug prices. something they currently are not allowed to do. why that wasn't included when they drew up aca still puzzles me? oh wait it doesn't because the purpose of aca was crony capitalism for insurance companies. if liberals want single payer so badly then you guys need to show through smart reforms that the government is the best solution. So far you have fallen on your faces.

[Spectral]

1. That's exactly what I meant by "if at all possible".

2. Yes, but there's absolutely no shortage of things that could use money. The infrastructure deficit in both your nation and mine is huge. And given my preference, I'd add a zero or two onto the NIH's and NSF's budgets.

As someone that worked in research, I'm skeptical of quick balloons to funding - they tend to get burnt on a lot of stupid shit in my experience, since there's a great deal of incentive to write grants that are held to a lot lower standard when there's a sudden influx of money.

That said, I'd love to see a much longer-run plan to sharply increase research expenditures. The funding rate of R01s is incredibly low, which discourages scientists to the point of them flatly dropping out of the field since there's effectively a ceiling on how many principal investigators can exist (and the old ones stick around too long). Again, bitter first-hand experience here.

I basically agree with you. As I mentioned to @alexw, I don't think we have a super substantive policy disagreement here, but I do think it's crucial to continue to be rigorous about demanding that politicians actually be bothered to allocate stimulus funds to useful projects. Without that pressure, there's a great deal of incentive for them to dump these into useless pork-barrel spending or worse.

[Deleted]

Frankly, I can't even understand the perspective of people that are super bent out of shape about this. OK, there's some waste and some things I'm not super happy about, that's valid. How does that go to being super angry about paying X% in taxes? Why would Y% be cool, but X% is just totally and obviously outrageous? I'm a lot more likely to look at the world around me and think, "am I getting my money's worth"? Well, the obvious answer is that yeah, modern life is fucking awesome and I wouldn't be in a position to earn what I do without having had access to great school and the massive tech sector that exists in no small part because of government investment and institutional stability.

Put another way, I like society and I'm fine with paying for one.

I pay very high taxes, for the cause of others ; and suffer a netloss of 37% Effective pay, for not working in the US.

That's a personal question, how much you care, i guess - But again, it's all about how close to reality you analyze your reality.

I have had experience of both sides of the coin, and i can tell you, i don't see the justification of losing an effective 37% pay, for 7 month wait times on Medical care, non-existant policing in my local cities, and a School system that is allegedly really bad, compared to some of the other ones available in the world (MiT and Shanghai both offered extremely competetive material, compared to Swedish material).

[Spectral]

simply because you have potential to make more money in the us. case in point what we have now isn't managed well. we have a chance to make good reforms next year to replace aca. we need to do things like allow medicare to negotiate drug prices. something they currently are not allowed to do. why that wasn't included when they drew up aca still puzzles me? oh wait it doesn't because the purpose of aca was crony capitalism for insurance companies.

Well, yeah, I agree with that also, but I'm not sure how it contradicts that idea of providing universal catastrophic coverage.

[artemishunter1]

I'd have to go check the exact amount I paid this year, but it's higher than American median tax expenditure by a wide margin. Not only do I pay my proverbial "fair share", I heavily subsidize the system.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that I don't pay much in taxes.

The "fair share" is in quotation because YOU YOURSELF acknowledge it is bullshit. If you genuinely cared for society, you would support everyone paying the same, since everyone would potentially get the same service or are rich people priortized first as a standard policy in your country? If not, then you lose the moral high ground.

[Spectral]

The "fair share" is in quotation because YOU YOURSELF acknowledge it is bullshit. If you genuinely cared for society, you would support everyone paying the same, since everyone would potentially get the same service or are rich people priortized first as a standard policy in your country? If not, then you lose the moral high ground.

I have no idea what this rant is about. I pay a shitload of money in taxes and I'm fine with it. I don't demand egalitarian outcomes at all, so I don't know what you're talking about here.