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Originally Posted by acropolis
there is some minimum amount of money needed a person needs to live on. and i'd hazard that the cost to society from someone pushed below this amount by taxes (broken windows + cash registers + missing money) is greater than the amount of money you would lose by just not taxing him in the first place.
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Well, the bigger picture view is that taxes would decrease in the longrun since there would be less incentive for people to vote for high levels of public spending. But more fundamentally, the equation "poverty causes crime" is oversimplistic, and would be more accurately phrased as "poverty,
when coupled with a sense of entitlement, causes crime". And of course, the current system helps to breed a sense of entitlement ("other people must pay for my education/healthcare/children!") which other systems would not.
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fair enough. i see property and inheritance taxes as being the viable 'wealth tax' options (is property tax EVIL?).
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All taxation is evil, but the choice between various forms of taxation should be motivated by pragmatics (mainly objectivity and enforcability), fairness (in the sense of everyone paying a relatively equal %), and apoliticality (ie trying to avoid situations where one political group can vote themselves things at the expense of another). The problem with using property and inheritence taxes as the primary source of governemnt income isnt that they are more 'evil' than income or sales taxes; its because a lot of property and inheritences do not take the form of liquid assets, which makes setting a high rate problematic. If I inherit a company or house valued at £1m and the inheritence tax rate is 20%, where am I going to find the £200,000 required to pay the tax? That just isnt how capital works.
edit: I'm going home now anyway so blah