With all this nonsense with Trump, it seems a lot of people don't realize that "your fair share" is whatever the tax code says it is. For example, the married couple next door that have 3 kids pay a lower tax rate than me, despite being more of a burden on the tax system. Are they not paying their fair share? Of course they are, since raising children in a stable 2 parent household is a massive benefit to our system and the continuation of our society. They're contributing in ways that I am not.
And that's good, although I'm looking at the other side of the coin: not just what tax breaks benefit the system, but which services should get tax dollars to also benefit the system.
To piggyback off your example, we can agree that a child raised in a stable 2-parent household is likely to be a massive benefit to the system. What about a poor single mother who gets pregnant and doesn't want the baby? Like how we understand the stable child is more likely to be a benefit, we also understand the unwanted poor one is more likely to be a burden. It would be less of a burden on the system to spend a little now and subsidize the poor mother's abortion than to not do so and then be burdened with a human life more likely to be on welfare, in the prison system, or otherwise unproductive enough to warrant the tax outlay to keep them going for however many decades.
Which is why, to go back to an earlier post of yours:
Conflating important stuff with meaningless stuff, in order to apply the same penalties is a joke.
We don't view that as meaningless. Just an example to think about, not a defense of all tax-provided benefits.
I oppose all manners of tax dodging (here's looking at you, Apple), as I do the obscene bonuses that high ranking corporate officials earn if it means having to lay off staff (your duty as a business it to keep people employed.... if you have to lay off people, paying yourself 7 plus figures in excess of a 6 figure plus base salary is hypocritical) or take from the corporate coffers what isn't theirs to take.
This is what I find to be a big driver of things. Most everyone I personally talk to is fine if with jobs paying differently depending on factors; I certainly do, as an engineer, and I don't begrudge my pharmacist friend making much more than me because his training was much more difficult. What gets people irked up is seeing CEOs get paid obscene amounts to run a company into the ground and jump out with a golden parachute at another job or simply walk away with few to no repercussions. (This is where I agree with LeVeL that more should have been done to persecute the bankers after the crash.)
Yup. Government is horribly inefficient by its very nature. There is zero motivation for government to move quickly, provide quality services, etc because they generally have no competition. It's why Uber has been so incredibly successful - they managed to infiltrate a market that the government has always had a monopoly on and it manages to offer the same service much more efficiently, more reliably, more conveniently,cheaper, safer, etc. It's also why charter schools are on the rise - take away government red tape and most markers will flourish.
And then the markets stagnate again as monopolies get established. Look at the telecomms: deregulation helped bring about massive monopolies where now large geographic areas are left with one choice for service that has no motivation to provide quality service, and even tries to play dirty to prevent competition as we see with Comcast trying to block Google Fiber in Nashville.
This is also not a new trend, as seen by Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel in the Gilded Age. The markets are not the end-all-be-all.
As an aside, I just want to provide an example of government red tape facing the other direction and preventing the government from working better. Before I was hired, the Army Corps of Engineers here was refurbishing one of the locks and dams on the Ohio River. The work was divided into two different contracts because there wasn't enough funding to do it all at once, so the first contract goes out for bids, gets awarded, and work starts. The work runs into issues, costs rise, budgets get exceeded, etc. They took a look at the second scope of work and saw that many of the same problems from the first contract would happen again.
This is where the red tape comes in: the Engineering & Construction division inside the Corps that administered the contract and the contractor from the first job now had a better idea how much it would cost to complete the second part of the rehab due to firsthand experience, but no one else bidding knew. Of course, the government adjusted its estimate but by its own rules it had to go to the lowest bidder (within reason), which was a different contractor. Then they ran into the same issues and costs rose to where it would have been cheaper to hire the first contractor (who submitted a more accurate bid, but it was higher than the second's and so they didn't get it). So why have that rule? Because there were problems in the past with the contracts getting awarded to the same company over and over with no due reason or corrupt reasons; the government administrators liked working with certain contractors over others, and in one case it was discovered one of the administrators was selecting his brother-in-law's company. The rule was put in place to stop that, which I think you can see were anti-competitive practices that also hamstring the government occasionally.
Agreed. As a business owner you also take on all the risk, which is why corporate CEOs get paid so damn much - a mistake by a secretary will likely go unnoticed, a mistake by an analyst might result in a bad quarter at worst, but a mistake by the CEO can bring down the entire company and everyone in it.
Again, not anathema to me. What I find disagreeable is often seen in charts like this:
CEOs are being paid too much. Capitalism was alive and well between 1965 and 1989 on that chart, then it all went crazy. I'm fine with CEOs earning so damn much, not ok with the current tulip mania.