Where did my taxes go?

Why, in your view, doesn't the same thing happen to them?

This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.

Which is why these calculators should tell people who pay less than $32K that they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes...

For example, if you have a country on the older side, most people will vote to heavily fund social security at the expense of education. As the demographics change, would be no mechanism to correct the issue. Demographics become destiny.

Similarly, taxes allow rich areas to prop up poor areas of the country. California subsidizes the majority of states for example.

Part of the genius of taxes as a technology is that it allows (forces) a large group of people to coordinate to solve problems that they wouldn’t have otherwise. In the ideal case, it allows smart, forward thinking people to solve collective issues.

For example, if you ask your average normal person who's critical of foreign aid spending how much they think we should spend on it, if they don't answer "zero dollars" (and most don't!) they're very likely to name a percent of the budget that would represent a huge increase in our foreign aid spending. This is because they think it's a far larger part of the budget than it is (probably because it's received such a huge amount of attention that they assume it must be a lot, or else why would their trusted media figures complain about it so much?)

Misconceptions like that abound. Like, you wanna guess where most people are gonna shift some of that money if you remind them to make sure they allow enough funding for maintaining our nuclear weapon stockpile, but don't tell them exactly where to put that money? I bet it's not the Department of Energy.

Moreover, this would just incentivize politicians for both nefarious and benevolent reasons to bundle unrelated stuff into departments that people choose to fund better, laundering their popularity into necessary-but-obscure services or pet-project/corruption stuff.

Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.

It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived.

I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.

The idea breaks down for the rich who are being taxed the most, because nobody wants them to have any say.

You could maybe do it for some percentage of taxes. Perhaps only for things that are desirable but not necessities (maybe Symphonies, science, high arts funding, sports funding, humanities education, BBC, other things people think they shouldn't pay for).

Although that would make people ask for a slider to reduce their taxes (to zero, thank you).

As with voting, implementing your idea would be subject to exploitation. For it to work, you would need a way of ensuring that each taxpayer/voter was authorized to vote, and voted only once. You would need to somehow prevent "harvesting" too.

Those who have an interest in exploiting the system would lobby for built-in weaknesses that they could exploit.

Change that to "allocation where they personally would like the entire budget to go." Otherwise, this is a recipe for an even worse power imbalance than we have today. The rich (who pay more taxes, and therefore whose sliders are more powerful) would have a greater influence on the budget than the poor, in your system.

If taxpayers should have the freedom to decide how the money that is taken from them is spent, then why shouldn't they have the freedom to decide how much money they pay?

If taxes aren't collected because the ends justify the means, then the only other option is that they are collected to punish the taxpayers.

The former can be morally justifiable, but how do you justify the latter?

I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.

If that were the case, I'd go all in on hookers and blow.

The alternative is Modern Monetary Theory, which states that the government and banking sector money creation fund spending, and governments cannot run out of currency.

Taxes control the money supply and mop up excess funds, which controls inflation.

Bonds set interest rates.

Spending is a strategic and political choice, not something limited by "the deficit" - which is literally just the difference between spending choices and taxation choices.

One very obvious tell is how Republicans make a lot of noise about the deficit and the debt, but always raise both when they're in office.

Always. Why? Because they spend government money lavishly on themselves and their patrons, and cut taxes for themselves and their patrons.

This doesn't "create jobs", it clogs up the system with sclerotic piles of cash that drive an extractive economy that sits on top of the productive economy most people live in.

This is very different economically to stability spending - welfare, healthcare, and such - and investment spending, such as direct funding of education and R&D.

In the MMT, the most significant drivers of inflation are corporate profiteering and supply shocks.

Like oil crises. For example.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

Also, as other commenters mention, the specifics of how money is disbursed or spent, matters. If, say, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to massively over-charge, than the same level of care would mean a higher level of spending than in other world states.

Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if at least part of it is the attitude that investments in these areas are "welfare" and not simply a part of the portfolio of essential services that are delivered by the state to citizens?

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...

[2]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

If anything this speaks to the cost of welfare in America.

The corollary is that many suggestions to reduce welfare spending would lead to even less actual welfare being delivered, without addressing systemic cost problems.

The reality is the US operates the world's largest social services apparatus, including the world's largest public healthcare system.

Social Security isn't really welfare -- it's more like a nationwide retirement plan, whereby I'm getting X back in future dollars for Y paid in now.

Medicare isn't really welfare either -- it's medical insurance that I am paying for in advance.

(Now you can argue that a percentage of SS and Medicare is welfare because there is a floor on how much you receive regardless of what you put in, though you have to have paid in for at least 10 years to be eligible to receive anything.)

So that really just leaves Medicaid and Safety Net as true welfare: 17.1%.

However, not at all surprised. That stat would arguably make the most material difference to voters, if only they knew about it.

Edit: Adds another degree of pain when you consider that the CEO-to-worker pay ratio reached 281-to-1 in 2024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_General_Account

> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.

Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.

The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy

Click down into a federal account and then change the drop down over the chart to "Recipient".

That said, the amount of fraud that was perpetuated here without any follow-through on enforcement is ... extremely not good.

― Alexis de Tocqueville

S&P: "AA+ with stable outlook"

Moody's: "Aa1 stable"

DBRS: "AAA stable"

In terms of FICO scores this would be ~820 or so. The US won't have any problem any time soon getting some more private sector money.

Which is just the tiniest bit worse than Germany, but not much. And it's a lot higher than France.

Standard & Poor's: AA+

Moody's: Aa1