bsphil wrote:
So only liberals should pay higher taxes?
That's not what I said at all. I said that there's some reasonableness to the argument that if liberals want to fund charity via government, that maybe they should be the ones to pay the extra costs associated with that charity. The whole "higher taxes" bit is more of a joke. It's meant to be a placeholder for the argument that instead of liberals funding charitable works with government money and making
everyone pay for them, that if they think those charities are so important, they should simply pay for them directly. Conservatives don't seriously think we should have different tax rates for different people based on political affiliation. It's just a point made to show how we should be doing this differently in the first place.
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Only people that provide aid to those less fortunate?
Like all the people who donate time and money to private charities of their choice? Yes. I would absolutely expect that they are donating
their time and money, not other people's.
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What about people that increase spending on programs that don't help people overall?
Yeah. Great argument for not spending money on those programs in the first place. Do you see how if instead of having the government run charitable programs, you let private charities do so instead, then those things will be funded exactly to the degree to which the people believe they are worth funding? So if *I* think that a certain homeless aid program is great, I can choose to donate money to it. But if I think that other programs aren't good ideas I can choose *not* to fund them with donations. That way, I'm never paying for anything that I don't think is a good idea.
That's what conservatives are really arguing here. The whole "how about only liberals pay the taxes for those things" is just an in between step to get the argument to that point.
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What about people that increase spending to wage war? Shouldn't they pay even more still?
Should they? National defense is at least on the list of things that governments "must do". The extra costs for wars on top of the normal amount we pay for this each year is really not as much as you might think. The reality is that social spending is much greater than military spending, and absolutely dwarfs the amount we actually spend fighting wars.
That's a BS response as well btw. It's another example of "yeah, but!".