NO POLITICS!!! 😡😡
I mind if my taxes don’t go to it!
I don’t mind if a homeless person spends money on things other than the bare essentials.
Then how are we gonna be millionaire if we give handouts to everyone 😡 /s
Question why there are any hungry and homeless.
My coworker does … he said the poor make more money than me or him and if we quit our jobs we’d be making just as much. I mean, we’re in tech, I highly doubt the “poor” are as “rich” as he thinks. I had to tell him that I’m not a DOGE/Musk fan even though we live in Canada … I said I’m very much a progressive. However, I asked him (since I don’t have any kids and he does) if he’d like to cut me a check for all the tax dollars I’ve lost due to educating his children …
I always find that argument hilarious.
“They have it so easy! They make so much money!”
You do it, motherfucker! There’s literally no barrier to entry.
I’d prefer it quite frankly above everything else.
We should have a well thought out and agreed upon list of priorities and everyone eats and sleeps inside should be the first things. The money should all go there first
I don’t mind if my taxes go to funding people who want to doss around making weird art, impractical furniture and/or shit music all day
shit music
I feel seen
Also: I’d rather pay the government for healthcare than pay an insurance company, who then pays the doctors.
Nerd communist / MMT economics time:
Your taxes don’t pay for anything actually. States can create arbitrary amounts of currency (USD in the USA, GBP in the UK, Yen in Japan…), they don’t need your taxes to pay for anything.
Taxes have several purposes, the main ones being:
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Forcing people to use the state’s currency by forcing taxes in that currency. Without dollars to pay your taxes denominated in dollars, you go to jail, so the currency you definitely need are dollars
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Removing money from certain sectors or people to reduce inequality. Taxing the richest businesses and companies can lead to decreases in inequality and to a more level playing ground.
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Removing money from the private sector economy altogether. Too much money in the private sector can, in some circumstances, lead to inflationary tendencies in market economies or to shortages in planned economies (though the relationship is more complicated than neoliberals want you to believe)
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Disincentivizing certain behaviours. Easy example is a sugar or alcohol tax.
The state can invest arbitrarily big amounts of money feeding the hungry or housing the houseless without the need for taxing this money first. The relationship between state deficit and inflation is not straightforward, and in fact there’s no serious empirical evidence suggesting that, in developed economies, deficit is a good predictor of inflation. Inflationary episodes mostly can be explained through supply shocks, more easily than through state deficit (where deficit means the state pouring more money into the economy than it pulls out through taxes).
For more nerdy communist / MMT economics, reply to this comment 😎
My libertarian friend says this same thing. Taxes are a scam and they just print the money they need.
But is it true ?
Taxes are not a “scam” in as much as they serve the purposes I outlined above. However, knowing that it’s definitely not taxes funding things like healthcare or education, it’s good to examine all taxes with a critical lens:
Should we tax the poorest of workers at all? If one of the main goals of taxation is decreasing inequality, why do we charge income taxes at all to workers earning below the average for example? You could argue that we need to remove money from the economy for macroeconomic purposes such as inflation, but then let’s do it from the richest and not the poorest?
Fun fact: you can tell your libertarian friend that the DPRK (aka North Korea) abolished income taxes in 1974. If they hate taxes so much, they’re free to move there!
Taxes bootstrap the value of the currency, and are a crucial inflation control mechanism.
The accounting connection between tax revenue and funding provided by a national government is entirely specious and imaginary.
OK, so every person should just stop paying them right now. What are they gonna do if we all do it ?
I wish.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point. Organizing the working class in well-lubricated organizations with the common goals of improving the material conditions in which we live is something I applaud. However, I wouldn’t start tackling taxes first of all. Income taxes maybe, at most, account for 50% of your income. However, surplus value stolen from workers by companies is closer to stealing 80% of your income (depending on a lot of factors). Companies earn a lot more money from our labor than they pay us back, and I would argue for the abolition of this private employer - employee relation altogether. What do you think?
Also, cool username
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I’m fine with housing and feeding the homeless, like block apartments and staples.
… but everyone will despise it. Low-income housing of any kind seems to create an entire new set of problems.
How does your country handle it? If you made this the law of the land in the USA it would immediately explode. The feds are not to be trusted, I mean, look at it. What a shithole.
Concentrating people of little means into a small area ostracizes them and removes them from areas with opportunity, arguably making them more desperate.
Poor people need to be mixed in with everybody else. The areas with the highest rates of social mobility in the US have the most mixing between classes. People in need will get support from people of means if they are seen as their neighbors and community members. And interacting with middle/ upper class families demonstrates to poorer kids how to manage money, how to seize opportunity, how to walk the walk and talk the talk of affluence, etc.
That would increase the costs astronomically, I don’t see how that’s feasible… and I’ve been very poor, and would still chose to live in a poor neighborhood with poor prices and cheap food.
Dropping me off in the middle of Park Ave, where a sandwich can cost $20 or more? No thank you.
When wealthy people go move into walled off gardens, yes they price everything to keep people out. But in a mixed community, you end up with mixed and middle-of-the-road retail prices. We’re not talking about dropping two impoverished people into Park Avenue; we’re talking about a community that is reflective of the county’s socio-economic distribution.
Vienna has over 60% of people living in government subsidized affordable housing. California has less than 5% of people living in government subsidized affordable housing. Do you think that Vienna just has more money to spend on affordable housing than California?
Money is not the problem. This is an already solved problem. The only reason homelessness exists is because a few wealthy people benefit from high housing prices. All we need to do is just copy Vienna’s homework. Instead, right wingers are copying USA’s homework and now homelessness has increased in Vienna for the first time in a decade.
