Ask Lemmygrad

"You know who doesn't work? Billionaires! At least sick people have a reason to have taxes go to them, they need help, billionaires don't.

That I value people without empathy about as much as they value people without jobs.

Flip the argument. Extoll how socialism has near 100% employment and relatively no homelessness, even providing good jobs to the disabled. Wiki will fact check this as true, because it agrees, but says that's bad

There are a lot of groups of people who can't take care of themselves: Children, the elderly, the sick or otherwise impaired, indigent, etc. We need to allocate some of the surplus product to take care of them (whether that's called taxes or anything else). This is why even under socialism, there is still a surplus; workers (at least on an individual level) will not keep all the value they produce, because some of it needs to go to these groups (as well as a few other things).

Unfortunately under capitalism, that surplus is mostly not allocated to the groups above; most of it is going to a few wealthy parasites living in opulence, laughing at the poverty of the rest of us.

They're falling prey to a common right-wing talking point: "Its not us who are the parasites, its actually poor people (or mothers or whatever group they want to demonize that given week). Please blame these other groups, its not us!"

Taxes aren't necessary in a socialist system. DPRK has no income tax. It would be the money that would have bought their boss his third lambo, that pays for keeping people off the streets instead.

This may not completely address the argument that the unemployed are lazy, but I think one has to keep in mind what unemployment benefits are for us workers. It's an extremely good weapon against our employers. A high unemployment benefit means that we have less to fear when it comes to class struggle. So if anyone argues against unemployed people getting paid, they're talking about stripping the workers of an important weapon they can use to improve working conditions for themselves in the future.

Feeding and housing people ARE SO MUCH less expensive than policing homeless. Even if one has zero empathy for the poor, the economic arguments make better sense.

I would say that investing into people that are on the bottom is a much healthier for society in the long term then simply ignoring them and expect them to deal with the odds stacked against them on their own. The reason that socialist countries often punch above their weight in science and many areas is because everyone is included and given a chance.

Your options for where your tax money goes in general are pretty bad. You can pay to make sure the military intentionally overspends and avoids budget cuts or similar issues. It can go towards police arresting the homeless, a punishment that is either summary execution or forcibly giving them a home with staff and a meal, that is designed to abuse them.

Or you can be OK with that money just giving them a home and food, and not carrying about making sure that a prison guard treats them and the other employees that work there like shit.

I agree, top bracket marginal tax rates should increase to 90%

I'd deflect to a different issue, because their minds will be made up about this if they really think feeding people in need is bad: "If the rich didn't tax dodge thanks to policies that favor them, policies that are usually created with input by the rich directly, or just outright written by them, we wouldn't even need to talk about this at all because we could find everything both of us want easily."

First of all, define "work". Lots of people do unpaid labor, like parents raising children, or family members caring for the elderly. These are necessary functions for society, and if people didn't do that labor for free, we would have to pay people to do it. Not compensating people for doing that labor is effectively taxing their labor at 100%. Childacre allowances, for example, aren't a subsidy for having children, they're compensation for the costs of having children, which is literally the only necessary requirement for furthering our species. The fact that these unpaid laborers don't have employment for money doesn't mean they aren't actively adding value. This is basic "we live in a society" stuff.

There are also plenty of people who largely aren't able or expected to work. Aside from the aforementioned unpaid careworkers, there are children, the elderly, the disabled, students, etc. Those people still need resources/services from society to support them. They aren't lazy freeloaders, they're mostly just in a different part of their lifecycle. Children eventually become working adults. We all eventually become old people who need to be able to retire as we become less able (and also people should get to stop working at some point as a matter of principle, but that's a digression). Students need to study so they can become doctors and teachers and engineers. It's in everyone's best interest to support people throughout that lifecycle, for obvious reasons.

Further, even bAsIC eCoNOmiCs tells us that a 0% unemployment rate is not only practically impossible, but also inefficient. It actually makes more economic sense to have at least 4% of the working population unemployed at any given moment so that there's a pool of labor that can fill gaps as the natural progression I mentioned above occurs. People change jobs, retire, go back to school, have kids, etc., and if everyone always had to have a job just to get enough income to survive, there wouldn't be anyone to fill positions left vacant by the above. That's why "full employment" in economics terms is usually pegged at around 4-6%. That means that it would be less efficient, and thus inevitably cost more tax dollars, to try and keep everyone employed instead of paying people a minimum income (plus various social services) even when unemployed.

At any given moment, only about half the population is actually "working" in the sense of being employed in some way, and that's how it's always been. You will likely spend only about 2/3 of your life working, and the fact that you're paying taxes on your income now is just the price you pay for all that unproductive time across the rest of your life, past and future. There is and always will be a universal need for supporting people who "don't work". I, personally, think that a bare-minimum of compassion for humanity is more than enough reason for redirecting society's resources to ensure a dignified existence for everyone, but even a misanthropic sociopath should be able to understand why their precious tax dollars should be spent on social infrastructure.

It's a problem of budget allocation. I'm not saying the way governments budget nowadays is good or necessarily the best, but start from where they're at and gloss over that point lol.

There's a budget for tons of stuff. The amount of money even local governments pull is mind-boggling. And if they can't rake it in, they take indefinite loans. Every government, even local ones, are indebted. And they loan the money in good times, and it creates this web of loans where everyone borrows and loans from/to everyone else.

When people say "this'll cost an extra 14 million a year!" that's nothing. Even 14 billion a year is nothing. It looks like a lot to us but when allocating budget, officers look at the bank statement that says 74000000000000000000000 and then start cutting chunks out of that.

The usual argument is "if we didn't pay for that, we could lower taxes". Could, but won't. Budgets are allocated at the beginning of the year and then each office has that much money to last them the whole year. If they don't use their budget, it'll get lowered next year because they showed they didn't need that money. That's why sometimes government offices spend their money on frivolous stuff and maybe that's a more pressing problem to tackle than someone getting a measly 400$ a month from the government.

People only look at the taxes they spend at the beginning of the year because that's a huge chunk of money coming out of their own finances, but we pay taxes all the time. You pay a tax on cigarettes, on gas, on everything you purchase through the VAT, toll roads, postal office, etc. This makes a lot of money to national governments too. They also have their own companies that don't really count as public interest (like water or public transport would, though most governments have also privatized those), like research institutions. Those work with the private sector and make money too.

If the gov needs to find money, it has the resources to find it without necessarily increasing taxes. It's gonna have to pull itself by its bootstraps and find solutions.

If you want to actually make taxes efficient you have to reduce the red tape. Not the services, but the access to such services. But rightos are not ready for that conversation, because despite their protests of wanting "smaller government" what they really want is to reduce social services. Applying for welfare benefits for example is usually a long, difficult process and this is done on purpose to prevent people from actually applying. All this red tape has a cost; the months you spend trying to apply for benefits are months someone needs to work on your case and assign you the paperwork. Tons of studies have shown that reducing oversight saves more money overall. It's the same thing in subway stations; cities pay police to catch people who didn't buy a ticket and spends more money doing that than it costs them in fare-dodging.

And yes like others have said, I'm not really concerned about someone barely being able to afford groceries because they get like 400$ a month from the government while you have rich people parking their millions in tax havens that they'll never spend. Let's get our priorities in order.

I had this conversation recently with a colleague that's on the right but not really giving it any thoughts. He's mostly voting for "meritocracy" so this kind of arguments is central to him.

I think it comes back to the idea that taxes are not "your money" to begin with, that you are involved, affected and protected by a network, and taxes is just the way we collectively agreed to keep all of us afloat as a regulated community.

Once agreed on that, the sting of "giving my money to the lazy" is reduced. Furthemore it's not like a no income life is one of luxury, we as a collective decided that starving should be prevented no matter what, and that's basically all the system is even trying to achieve.

So you can rest easy, the "lazy" are still suffering.

What do you tell people who say that they don’t want their taxes going for people who don’t work?

I say to those people: "eat shit"

I would tell them that their claim means that they would confiscate all the public services, property ownership rights, inheritance rights, and other services that the British diaspora gained their their Indigenous child slaves in Residential fake schools that continued after 1998 and the stolen inheritance from Indigenous children in the fake cultural assimilation projects. Contrary to the belief of the British emigrants, the work that the British emigrants done contributes little to their actual success; the Indigenous people, African Americans, and other people of colors had bear almost all the burden for the success of the Western European diaspora.

I think I would generally go into more detail with the person on what they mean by "don't work." If they don't care about what happens to disabled people, the elderly, children, then they aren't worth the energy.

Some people have this idea that people who are taken care of won't want to work so they need to be pushed into it without a safety net, but I would point out that capitalism forces artificial scarcity of jobs to maintain a competitive environment; creates hostile and unsustainable work environments; foments hyperindividualism and destroys community in order to maintain power, so people more end up depressed, demoralized, and unmotivated to do anything; and it's not exactly motivating to spend your life working just to make someone richer. Capitalism is already creating conditions where people who can work won't be working.

So when people say they don't want their taxes going to people who don't work:

1. Do they even live under a system where they have a say in where their tax dollars go in the first place? Plenty in the US are pissed about their tax dollars going to fund genocide, but it's happening anyway. If they lived under a system of working class power, the people would be working to overcome problems that relate to those who can work not working, among other things.

2. Do they understand that it's not a variable you pull out of reality and check yes or no on and move on with your life? Its presence or the lack of it is connected to other mechanisms. It's never just "your taxes go to people who don't work or they do." It's never just "people don't want to work." Those are surface level things in a whole pervasive political system that goes into every aspect of life.

First, I would say: same, way more money goes in subsidies and pseudolegal tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy than on welfare.

Second, I would try to explain that that's not actually how taxes work anyway. The government doesn't gather all the tax money into a big pile, count it all up, and then make a budget to decide how to spend it. Instead, money collected as taxes basically just ceases to exist - it's deducted from your account and disappears. Separately to this, the government simply creates as much money as they want to fund their budget. (At least, any government with currency sovereignty does - this excludes Eurozone countries and many local or municipal authorities, who actually do have to make a money pile, or else borrow it from somewhere.)

Printing too much money can have inflationary effects - prices increase because there's more money around to buy things - so taxing away and destroying some money is necessary, but if the newly printed money is spent to develop economic activity then you can actually safely print more than you tax by quite a large margin. Neoliberal economists are incapable of/choose not to understand this because it leads to higher wages, lower unemployment and increased bargaining power for the workers, which could ultimately lead to greater political power. Instead they preach austerity doctrine, telling the lie that governments need to cut services and reduce spending to 'reduce their deficit', selling off public goods and services to the private sector so they can extract a profit - at the expense of the nation's people.

That most of the population does not need to be taxed; it is supposed to be - at least nominally - that the wealthiest elites give some of the wealth back to the labourers that they have appropriated from to maintain a sufficient quality of life to carry on producing wealth for the elites.

However, as the wealthiest elites have power over legislature they have shifted the tax burden on to the rest of us. And through their media have asked us not to blame them - ie not to blame those who do not work and make money of the labour of others - but to blame the poorest instead.

The question is why would one willingly propagate their propaganda for them. If one stops working are they more likely to become destitute or join the wealthiest elite? If it is the former then one is closer to the poorest sectors of society than the wealthiest.

However, if they are aleady framing the question as suggested by OP then it is unlikely that appealing to their empathetic sensibilities will be effective.

You could even make the argument that a nation's wealth is not its tax revenue but I figured we should may be focus on existing narratives within capitalist mythologies.

However, the above logical explanations of capitalist society is unlikely to work. Westerners intelligently seek out racist and bourgois narratives as they feels it benefits them. And this western culture (or more correctly culture of the bourgousie) has permeated globally to all the other capitalist countries as it fits their class perspectives

/edit: clarity