Sir Xsarus wrote:
You make a nod towards it with the subsistence comment, then turn around and pretend that isn't the case.
Because it isn't the case most of the time. Our current tax system does not tax those who are earning less than (or even close to) a mere subsistence level
at all. In fact, it provides them with various credits that sometimes result in an effective negative tax rate. I'm addressing the idea that our existing tax system isn't "fair enough" and doesn't tax "the rich" enough. That's just plain not correct. We're not really talking about rich versus poor here. We're talking about someone making X dollars above subsistence versus someone making 100X dollars above that level. That is by far the more common comparison, and the one we should at least examine in terms of the impact of our tax policy.
And for all those people, who make up the overwhelming majority of taxpayers, the difference isn't about whether you can eat, but whether you can afford a new Xbox, or a new model car. And in that scenario the harm of X dollars of tax is equal for everyone.
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Taking $100 from one person may have significant effects on their life even if they can still afford supper, whereas taking $100 from you wouldn't be reflected at all in your lifestyle. It would be an annoyance. How is this the same amount of harm?
Because it's the same amount of dollars lost. I'm honestly baffled how you could think otherwise.
Also, I touched on it in my earlier post. If we're honest about this, we should grant that taxing more dollars cause more harm. The correct way to view it isn't that the rich person is harmed less, but that the rich person can absorb more harm. I just find it to be dishonest to view it the other way around. And also potentially dangerous because once you adopt the idea that taxing people (some people anyway) doesn't harm them, you get yourself into an odd kind of "us versus them" viewpoint.
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It's either the same amount of harm or it isn't. You can't draw a line and say, well if they can't buy supper, I guess it's more harm, but if it's not a super obvious immediate hardship then it's clearly exactly the same.
It's the same amount of harm. As I said above, we should look at it in terms of who can handle more or less harm, and not try to define harm itself by what becomes some kind of sliding metric. That may seem like a purely semantic difference, but it affects the way we think about the issue. Given the number of times I've run into people on this forum insisting up and down that taxes don't represent harm at all, I think it's important how we label this. All taxes are "harm". We may choose to harm some people more than others because we assess that they can handle that harm better from an economic point of view, but we should never lose sight of the fact that we are, in fact, causing harm when we tax people.
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Lets focus on fines for a second, what is the purpose? Would you say that it is to try and prevent a certain type of behavior? If so the deterrent has to be something that has an impact. Losing a certain amount of money isn't the same impact for all people.
I do happen to think that's a dangerous way to view things though. So should a 20 year old get a longer sentence than a 40 year old for the same crime purely because he has more years of his life left? We do make exceptions in sentencing (sometimes) on compassionate grounds when people are near death, but that should always be the exception. Adopting such a scheme as the rule would be a bad idea, no?
In the case of dollars, they have the same value for everyone. Again, I'm mainly arguing against what I view as a dangerous trend of assessing harm itself in such a relative way. The harm is the same. We may, in some cases, decide that greater harm is needed to provide a sufficient disincentive, but we should always recognize that we're doing
more harm to that person for some given reason. Trying to do what you're doing here is just strange IMO. And a bit dishonest. I really do believe that this concept is mostly adopted out of a desire to justify doing greater relative harm to "others" rather than as some kind of fair assessment. In my experience when I run into this idea about taxes and harm, it's usually when someone's arguing for more and more taxes on "the rich". And it really does strike me as more of an excuse than a solid rational assessment.
It's easier to adopt an unfair tax scheme when you avoid thinking of taxes as harmful. I think we should at least acknowledge that we are, in fact, harming people. If we decide that we should harm group A more than group B for some reason, then we're at least being honest about what we're doing. And at the risk of bringing this back on topic a bit, this whole "how much harm is caused" bit was the result of me saying that our tax system currently harms people disproportionately, and far out of relation to relative earnings. If it was really about equitable harm, wouldn't we adopt an actual flat tax on earnings? The reality is that our current system is far far out of whack in terms of relative tax rates. I'm just trying to point this out, and in response I got this whole "relative harm" counter. But, as I've stated a few times, I think that's just a dishonest way of avoiding really looking at the issue. Again, if you truly believed that taxes should be relative to income (the "harm" caused by losing X dollars), shouldn't you support a flat tax on earnings? Yet, pretty much without fail, those who are loudest with the idea that taxes cause different amounts of harm relative to earnings, oppose flat taxes on earnings. So it's not really about being "fair", it's about avoiding thinking of what you're doing as harmful so you can more easily support something that is "unfair".
And that I find to be dishonest.