"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%

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.

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.”

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”

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.