What do you want for your tax dollars?

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 9:23pm

I think it's good to start with a question when engaging political issues. My audiences are the folks who are "undecided" about who to vote for, or who have chosen another pointless insider to support.

I really haven't been paying attention to the debates or anything the candidates have been saying, to be honest. Who cares what bland platitudes these people mouth? If they don't like what they said when they were pandering after your vote, they can walk it back after you voted for them. So in a very real sense you can't really talk to most of the candidates currently on the market. Most political rhetoric isn't serious. Look at who's giving them money -- that's how you'll know what they do.

You can tell pretty much what's going to happen when the nice politicians get into office by which group they run with. Donald Trump was an entertainer. During the Bush Junior years he was a Democrat. Now he's a Republican. So he hires Republicans, who have a long record of doing certain things. Then he fires them, because his catchphrase when he was an entertainer was "you're fired." Then he hires more Republicans. It's not brain surgery.

There remains one question. But you can ask this question only of the voters. "What do you want for your tax dollars?" is the question I want to ask.

Let's review some of the things we're currently getting for our tax dollars.

Airplanes and weapons systems for pointless wars.
Pointless wars, most of which are pointless because they encourage more weapons spending, which keeps the "defense" manufacturers rich.
Other military
Subsidies for corporate business. Subsidies for fossil fuels, for instance, which keep America in the climate change business. Or agribusiness, which keeps a New Hampshire-sized area of the Gulf of Mexico good and dead with fertilizer/ herbicide/ pesticide runoff.
Obamacare. It's good your insurance is cheaper, especially if you're part of the 78% that lives from paycheck to paycheck. But don't earn too much, otherwise it won't be cheaper. Last I received a subsidy I lived well below the poverty line. Oh, and don't get sick, unless you can leave the country in a hurry.
Prisons. Lots of people in captivity means a cheap labor force for the corporations. And more crime when they get out, which means more prisons.
Schools, and student loan debt. Not enough if you ask me, and not enough questions about what the schools are about.
The postal service, which they're trying to privatize.
Payments on the national debt.
National parks, forests, BLM, and stuff.
Maybe a little for food stamps and welfare. But don't expect this to last too long.

Did I miss anything? (Of course there's this nonsense about Social Security, which is essentially a publicly-run trust fund.)

Now, if you're talking to one of the beneficiaries of current fiscal policy, the conversation is probably going to end soon. But fiscal policy is the way it is because practically nobody asks "what do I want for my tax dollars?" Instead politics is tribal stuff. You belong to the (D) tribe or the (R) tribe, or maybe you belong to the tribe that funds both parties and reaps the rewards. People talk one way or another based on which tribe they're in.

So I think that's the way you approach it. You ask them what they want for their tax dollars, and then you slowly break it to them about the vast difference between what they want for their tax dollars and what they're currently getting. I presume that's what Bernie Sanders is doing.

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Submitted by Situational Lefty on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 11:53pm

Bernie is basically a New Deal Democrat from the 1940s

Nowadays he's considered to be a far left socialist agitator.

We have Bill Clinton to thank for that.

In 1991 the Democratic Party decided it could compete with the Republican Party for corporate donations in the name of "winning elections" and convinced itself it would not compromise any of it's principles

The Democratic Party has shifted ever right-ward since.

—

"The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Yossarian

Submitted by PriceRip on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 2:37am

So, not an anti-Bernie comment.

@Situational Lefty

In some respects we have traveled back in time. Too bad in some other respects we haven't traveled back in time. Every change during the past several decades has been to accentuate the worse and suppress the best of our prior decisions.

RIP

Submitted by Situational Lefty on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 12:08am

I don't think I've ever made an anti-Bernie comment

@PriceRip He's my second choice and I really only prefer Tulsi Gabbard because she's about 40 years younger than Bernie.

My point was that Bernie would basically have been a moderate Democrat in the 1940s and corporate money has corrupted the whole process thanks in large part to Bill Clinton.

It didn't help much when Barack Obama's first move after his election was picking Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff.

I don't know about anyone else, but I felt betrayed and stupid when he made that announcement.

—

"The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Yossarian

Submitted by PriceRip on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 10:17am

As a child of the 50s and 60s

@Situational Lefty

I remember how different the world was then. So, most readers find it difficult (nay impossible) to understand that we were actually on the way to solving some of our problems. The difficulty I have talking to people (and in particular writing to people) is that everything said or written is so context intensive that to make oneself really understood requires a "wall of text" and even then a slight error of phrasing derails the whole conversation …

RIP

Submitted by RantingRooster on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 8:23am

Asking questions is important...

So asking the question, what do I want for my taxes, however, is not the correct question, because, Taxes Do Not Fund Government Spending.

Think for a moment, 188 democrats just voted to give the Orange Monster with Tiny hands, billions more in defense spending than he had asked for. Where is the increase in taxes to cover that increase in spending? (crickets...)

Did anyone, I mean anyone, ask the question, how are we going to pay for that? (crickets...)

While the Orange Monster was engaging in a criminal act of War, assassinating a top General of Iran, at the same time and very convenient, the Fed released their Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes which shows the Fed has been pumping billions daily into the Repo market since Sept of last year. (From WallStreetOnParade.Com)

The Fed’s minutes also acknowledge that its most recent actions have tallied up to “roughly $215 billion per day” flowing to trading houses on Wall Street. There were 29 business days between the last Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting and the latest Fed minutes, meaning that approximately $6.23 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street’s trading houses had been made in that short span of time.

Where are the "taxes" to cover this $250 billion per day, $6 + trillion since Sept. 2019, in cheap loans to Wall Street?

Let me repeat, Taxes do not fund government spending. For more information see this primer on MMT at NewEconomicPerspectives.org

—

C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

Submitted by QMS on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 8:54am

Raping the world

@RantingRooster
Pays well for the big dogs.
Poverty sucks for the rest of us.

Submitted by longtalldrink on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 12:01pm

I think it was Michael Moore who pointed out

@RantingRooster that unlike France (for instance), the US does not show on our paychecks the itemization of just what does make up the figure of the Federal Tax taken out of our paychecks. A whopping portion of our taxes goes to the military. Most people believe (mistakenly) that our taxes go for the common good.

—

Well done is better than well said-Ben Franklin

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 2:20pm

Yes but my question is still the appropriate one.

@RantingRooster MMT is a one-trick pony. Its virtue is that it describes how dollar hegemony works better than any theory which imagines a general inflation as a consequence of the printing of dollars. The banks suck up the surplus dollars and dollar-denominated assets because they don't want their existing stocks of dollars to lose value, and so inflation is averted (outside, say, of stocks and real estate) even though the US government is $23 trillion in debt and growing.

It would all end, the vast government military spending-party and the MMT which explains it, tomorrow if, for instance, the Bank of China, which maybe owns $3 trillion in dollars and dollar-denominated assets, were to unload its $3 trillion on the open market. Such an event would cause a global run on the dollar and a massive adjustment as the value of individual dollars adjusted itself to the vast increase of dollars in circulation (as opposed to the vast quantity currently socked away in bank vaults and as computer pixels. This is also why the US government is inclined to declare war upon countries which try to avoid trade in dollars; Venezuela for instance.

The problem with MMT is the same problem as with other formulations of economics. Economics, as an academic discipline, was historically an attempt to circumvent Marx's critique of political economy (within the context of the growing universities of the 19th century) by making economic principles axiomatic and thus beyond question within the discipline. The history of this is to be found in Kees van der Pijl's A Survey of Global Political Economy. Historical economics is not radically different from the one practiced in universities today.

Marx, on the other hand, wanted to show that political economy was not a matter of "equal exchange" but rather a matter of coercion and control between radically unequal participants. The Marx concept loses a lot of steam by being made into a system -- Marx's basic idea was to debunk political economy by revealing the basis of "economy" in the labor of the working class.

The key Marxist concept is the "labor theory of value." The idea is that the value of a commodity is to be measured in the average socially-necessary labor time used to make all of the commodities. The point of saying it this way was not really to help everyone calculate the value of individual commodities. Rather, it was to say: "to create a system of commodities you must create a working class, and to create a working class you must create a way for said working class to survive. So you must pay said working class for its socially-necessary labor time." There isn't much point to it beyond that, and way too much has been written about the labor theory of value that is of no consequence. The "labor theory of value" is thus a bad theory if what you want to do is calculate values. It's a good theory if you want to debunk economics as politics.

Which brings us back to the problem of income taxes and government policies. The income taxes do not fund the policies in any direct way. Yet the income taxes continue, we continue to pay them, we're not going to stop paying them, and the policies continue, they're not going to stop either. Both taxes and policies are methods of political control, and that's what matters. The fact that there isn't a one-to-one relationship between the taxes and the policies is thus trivial -- people are justified, then, in asking why they continue to pay taxes if the policies they're getting are such lousy ones.

—

"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

Submitted by PriceRip on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 10:35am

MMT is a one-trick pony.

@Cassiodorus

Actually this is not true. But, then again, I am a physicist and I don't see the world the way you do.

RIP

#2 MMT is a one-trick pony. Its virtue is that it describes how dollar hegemony works better than any theory which imagines a general inflation as a consequence of the printing of dollars. The banks suck up the surplus dollars and dollar-denominated assets because they don't want their existing stocks of dollars to lose value, and so inflation is averted (outside, say, of stocks and real estate) even though the US government is $23 trillion in debt and growing. It would all end, the vast government military spending-party and the MMT which explains it, tomorrow if, for instance, the Bank of China, which maybe owns $3 trillion in dollars and dollar-denominated assets, were to unload its $3 trillion on the open market. Such an event would cause a global run on the dollar and a massive adjustment as the value of individual dollars adjusted itself to the vast increase of dollars in circulation (as opposed to the vast quantity currently socked away in bank vaults and as computer pixels. This is also why the US government is inclined to declare war upon countries which try to avoid trade in dollars; Venezuela for instance. The problem with MMT is the same problem as with other formulations of economics. Economics, as an academic discipline, was historically an attempt to circumvent Marx's critique of political economy (within the context of the growing universities of the 19th century) by making economic principles axiomatic and thus beyond question within the discipline. The history of this is to be found in Kees van der Pijl's A Survey of Global Political Economy. Historical economics is not radically different from the one practiced in universities today. Marx, on the other hand, wanted to show that political economy was not a matter of "equal exchange" but rather a matter of coercion and control between radically unequal participants. The Marx concept loses a lot of steam by being made into a system -- Marx's basic idea was to debunk political economy by revealing the basis of "economy" in the labor of the working class. The key Marxist concept is the "labor theory of value." The idea is that the value of a commodity is to be measured in the average socially-necessary labor time used to make all of the commodities. The point of saying it this way was not really to help everyone calculate the value of individual commodities. Rather, it was to say: "to create a system of commodities you must create a working class, and to create a working class you must create a way for said working class to survive. So you must pay said working class for its socially-necessary labor time." There isn't much point to it beyond that, and way too much has been written about the labor theory of value that is of no consequence. The "labor theory of value" is thus a bad theory if what you want to do is calculate values. It's a good theory if you want to debunk economics as politics. Which brings us back to the problem of income taxes and government policies. The income taxes do not fund the policies in any direct way. Yet the income taxes continue, we continue to pay them, we're not going to stop paying them, and the policies continue, they're not going to stop either. Both taxes and policies are methods of political control, and that's what matters. The fact that there isn't a one-to-one relationship between the taxes and the policies is thus trivial -- people are justified, then, in asking why they continue to pay taxes if the policies they're getting are such lousy ones.

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 6:39pm

This is a really shallow response.

@PriceRip Do you, like, argue substantively?

—

"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

Submitted by PriceRip on Thu, 01/09/2020 - 1:00am

From Time To Time

@Cassiodorus

The exciting thing about Modern Monetary Theory is that it does away with the reification of abstract concepts, in particular monetary units. For people like me it is very important to be cognizant of the danger (pit fall, trap, or whatever you may wish to call it) of confusing the Real with the social construct.

Too many conflate the core properties of the various economic systems with the sociopolitical context in which they (the economic systems) exist and often conflate their values with the properties under examination.

The core problem is that it is hard to penetrate the noise to get to a fundamental understanding …

Taxes represent the Annihilation of monetary units, while Spending represents the Creation of monetary units. The basic Component of an economy is the Transaction. A Transaction is an Event involving more than one primitive vertex linking Creation of monetary units to Annihilation of monetary units.

… that allows you to develop a value-free description of the economic environment.

The next step is to talk about how no system no matter how well it is constructed is self-sustainable for any meaningful amount of time. Indeed (much like the founding of the US^_ofA) the social construct requires continuous adjustment to "keep it on track" as it were. That means, to reflect the society's values the annihilation of monetary units must be designed to remove money from the "appropriate" sector(s) of society. Similarly, the creation of monetary units must be designed to inject money into the "appropriate" sector(s) of society.

It is the tweaking of these input and output mechanisms that define the overall goodness, or badness of a given system. This assessment attains for all the (---)isms that can be named and can ever be named. The challenge then is how, for whatever social system you have, can you make it as fair and just as possible.

RIP

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Fri, 01/10/2020 - 3:08am

I can at least work with this

@PriceRip

For people like me it is very important to be cognizant of the danger (pit fall, trap, or whatever you may wish to call it) of confusing the Real with the social construct.

I don't believe that social constructs are any less "Real" than physical objects. Karl Marx might have said, famously, that "so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or in a diamond," but this doesn't mean that exchange-value, the one attribute money has, isn't real. It simply means that exchange-value isn't a physical attribute. Physical reality is not the only reality.

Now you can complain that I'm nit-picking, that when you said "Real" you meant physical. But we need to take the real existence of exchange-value (and thus of money, and thus also of people paying their taxes and getting policies for them in return) seriously. When Karl Marx wanted to explain the whole idea of exchange-value as, in his terms, a mystical attribute of objects, he didn't just say, "exchange-value isn't real." He said:

Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community.

Why? You have to picture a whole new f*cking society, one in which people work for the community and not for money, if you are to step outside of the reality of exchange-value.

And that's why I argued that, even though there is no one-to-one relationship between tax money and (Federal) government policies (for now), people are still JUSTIFIED in wondering what they're getting for their taxes. Paying taxes is still an EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP.

—

"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

Submitted by PriceRip on Fri, 01/10/2020 - 12:54pm

This would be a barrier

@Cassiodorus

to an conversation we could have

I don't believe that social constructs are any less "Real" than physical objects.

Social constructs by any reasonable "definition" can and are changed virtually by a whim. I purposefully use a capital "R" to distinguish the reality outside from that which is defined by our preferences and choices.

So, it would seem we, you and I, are at the end of our journey. I will endeavor to not bother you further.

Good Day,

RIP

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Sun, 01/12/2020 - 11:07am

I await the "whim"

@PriceRip that ends the money system.

—

"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

Submitted by PriceRip on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 10:32am

There is another ...

@RantingRooster

that understands that Taxes do not Fund …

Let us take the next step my young Padawan, Taxes represent an Annihilation of monetary units, while Spending represents a Creation of monetary units. The basis of an economy is the Transaction. A Transaction is an Event involving more than one primitive vertex linking Creation of monetary units to Annihilation of monetary units.

RIP, Jedi Master

Submitted by RantingRooster on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 5:51pm

Stop and think for a moment,

without getting into a deep, off track analysis of Marx or theories of value, how did the US bail out the TBTF banks?

What new legislation was passed, that authorized new taxes to pay for the bailout? Where did the money come from? That was not "military spending", nothing was introduced to raise taxes to pay for it.

Congress did pass multiple pieces of legislation, TARP an others, but no new taxes to fund the legislation. It was, essentially, simply a few key strokes at the Fed and the Treasury, and poof, money for criminally corrupt bankers flowed like a tsunami, a $29 trillion tsunami.

The Federal Reserved simply bought up $4 trillion worth of bad mortgages in their multiple rounds of QE, using money created out of key strokes on a computer.

Where is the $250 billion a day, the NY Fed is currently pumping into wall street repo market coming from? Shit, congress isn't even asking questions as to why this is happening, again...

If we need congress to spend money on services, we the people want, we just need congress to write the legislation to authorize the Treasury department to start sending checks to X, Y and Z providers...No new taxes are required, what so ever. (I reckon that would have been a better statement than taxes do not fund government spending, apologies! )

As for MMT, it simply describes how that works and why that is for monetary sovereign nations like the US. MMT hits a wall with the EU, because individual nations in the EU are not monetarily sovereign nations anymore. France, or any other EU nation can no longer print their own money, just like Texas can't print it's own money because it's apart of the American Union, ie the United States union.

The US has been spending trillions, via legislation, ie the N.D.A.A., on these endless and illegal, military adventures over the last two decades, and about to get involved in a new one that nobody has asked how are we gonna pay for it, because it doesn't include any new taxes to pay for all the new spending contained it.

Each previous administration has cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and gutted government spending on "socials services", because too many people think that some how, what we collect in taxes must be equal too what we spend on government, to some how "balance the budget". It's completely and utterly absurd.

—

C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 7:50pm

It's not off track at all

@RantingRooster

off track analysis of Marx

It's not off track at all. Value comes from PEOPLE'S HARD WORK. They work hard for their taxes and they get sh*t for it from their government. Do you not respect that? Do you not give a f*ck about the f*cking working class? If a doctor put a stethoscope to you, would she find a heart?

how did the US bail out the TBTF banks

Yes, I understand how that happened, and I SHOWED that I understand how it happened. Why are you lecturing me on things I already understand?

without getting into a deep, off track analysis of Marx or theories of value, how did the US bail out the TBTF banks? What new legislation was passed, that authorized new taxes to pay for the bailout? Where did the money come from? That was not "military spending", nothing was introduced to raise taxes to pay for it. Congress did pass multiple pieces of legislation, TARP an others, but no new taxes to fund the legislation. It was, essentially, simply a few key strokes at the Fed and the Treasury, and poof, money for criminally corrupt bankers flowed like a tsunami, a $29 trillion tsunami. The Federal Reserved simply bought up $4 trillion worth of bad mortgages in their multiple rounds of QE, using money created out of key strokes on a computer. Where is the $250 billion a day, the NY Fed is currently pumping into wall street repo market coming from? Shit, congress isn't even asking questions as to why this is happening, again... If we need congress to spend money on services, we the people want, we just need congress to write the legislation to authorize the Treasury department to start sending checks to X, Y and Z providers...No new taxes are required, what so ever. (I reckon that would have been a better statement than taxes do not fund government spending, apologies! ) As for MMT, it simply describes how that works and why that is for monetary sovereign nations like the US. MMT hits a wall with the EU, because individual nations in the EU are not monetarily sovereign nations anymore. France, or any other EU nation can no longer print their own money, just like Texas can't print it's own money because it's apart of the American Union, ie the United States union. The US has been spending trillions, via legislation, ie the N.D.A.A., on these endless and illegal, military adventures over the last two decades, and about to get involved in a new one that nobody has asked how are we gonna pay for it, because it doesn't include any new taxes to pay for all the new spending contained it. Each previous administration has cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and gutted government spending on "socials services", because too many people think that some how, what we collect in taxes must be equal too what we spend on government, to some how "balance the budget". It's completely and utterly absurd.

—

"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate