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General Discussion / Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: Post-Apocalypse
« on: December 03, 2016, 07:57:11 pm »I think one question that we can ask about fairness in taxation is: to what extent has each person financially benefited from infrastructure spending? And I would consider all public spending in that.
e.g. a boss of a company expects that he can hire a cheap supply of people who can read and write without needing to train people in that. He can also expect that his customers, suppliers etc can read and write. He benefits financially from these things. Plus all the little skills, numeracy, computer skills etc. We see these skills as being universal to the point of being worthless, so you just take them for granted, but they are what societies spend large amounts of money to ensure are universal. And many businesses would be worthless if those skills weren't invested in.
And those costs are not captured in direct trade such as wage labor exchanges. e.g. the more a country spends on teach computer skills, the less it costs to hire someone with those skills. In that sense, clearly training people in computer skills subsidizes all businesses who want to hire people with those skills: more training costs to the state means less costs to businesses, and less pay to the employee who has the trained skills. Clearly, the boss is the big financial winner when we increase training in computer skills, so he's the guy who should be paying the most for it.
Plus, a boss expects he can pay minimum wage and have a steady flow of workers who can afford to get to his business. Not to mention how customers can actually get to your business for cheap so that they can afford your products. That implies subsidized transportation networks, because if you went for a completely user-pays based transport system there's no fucking way people who are paid minimum wage could afford what it costs for their share of the roads to get to work. The worker directly benefits from this (can use the publicly-funded roads and buses to get to work), but it's the boss who disproportionately benefits from this (he gets a financial benefit from each and every worker, and customer, who can use public roads to access his location).
Therefore, there's a case that people who earn a ton of money are actually benefiting from social investment much more than people who are poor: because they're reaping the benefits of everyone in the pyramid below them. Someone who makes a million dollars a year is very unlikely to be personally creating $1 million in value: they are reliant on a large number of lower-down workers who do labor that makes their job possible, and each of those workers was invested in by the taxpayer.
And one step further, all those companies building stuff efficiently for people is what results in everything related to modern life, including any standard of living enjoyed by anyone within the system. Hence, our fancy whatever exists primarily on the back of modern, educated society so it's only far that the burden for that modern society is shared.