The irony about raising taxes being hard, Republicans don't seem to mind at all raising taxes, so long as the taxes are targeted at people who are Democrats, at least the subset of Democrats with above-average incomes.
For example, the limit on SALT deductions matters most for people in blue states. The limit on home mortgage interest deduction matters most for people who buy homes in cities with high housing costs, most of whom are Democrats. The house bill to make EV drivers pay a 3X the road tax of gas car drivers was made with full knowledge that EV drivers are predominantly Democrats.
At the end of the day, it's a culture war battle. Nobody on either side wants to raise taxes on people they believe to be the "real Americans", but they do want the "enemies" to pay more in taxes so that the "real Americans" can get services for less. For the Democrats, the "enemies" are the billionaires. For the Republicans, the "enemies" are Democrats (or, at least, the subset of Democrats with above-average incomes, but not high enough to be rich).
Is there any data on voters being more willing to support tax increases in places with better governance/less corruption?
One of my many gripes with the DOGE-foolery that we did for the first half of the year is that there really are a lot of brokenly inefficient/wasteful things done by the federal government, and it would be nice to have people make a serious attempt at fixing that stuff, instead of trying to win Twitter every day with BS "discoveries" of waste, fraud, and abuse.
I suspect taxes would go down much much easier if they just disappeared from your paycheck and there was no long tax return process. If we just taxed wages (just as progressively as income) before it was given to the worker so they never even heard about it I think people would find it less upsetting.
I mean lots of people seem willing to believe that taxes on wages that are 'paid' by the employer aren't paid by them.
It astounds me how much people seem to care about this... I rarely even look at my paystubs unless something seems egregious. Whereas I can see the tariffs in evidence in the price rise on collectibles quite easily.
One of the things that makes me so sad about all of this is how hard it is to get people to realize that if everyone was taxed more and that tax was phases in gradually things wouldn't feel any worse.
The price of our biggest expense -- housing is determined by what other people can pay so taxing everyone doesn't change what you can afford (unf construction costs are rarely driving the prices). And even most other consumption affects us only in how it relates to what we are used to and that of others. In other words we care about improving over time and keeping up with the Joneses and relatively little about absolute consumption. It's not like we are way happier than we were in the 50s even though we are massively objectively wealthier in inflation adjusted terms.
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So I've come to the unhappy conclusion that people just aren't going to be rational about this and the only way forwards is to exploit that. For some reason people don't seem to think of regulations or taxes on corporations as being a tax they are paying so as much as I believe in theory you tax the shareholders and the people a corporation pays maybe we just have to eat the economic losses to taxing corporations because people just think about money and taxes emotionally.
I know easier said than done, but isn’t a huge problem here that we (in the US, but I’m also thinking NYC given the primary) are so bad and inefficient at spending tax dollars? Like we should hypothetically be able to have a fantastic social democracy with great universal programs given our tax rates and revenue, but we just allocate the funds *terribly*
Raising (income) taxes is hard. People seem to be more OK with land/property taxes or consumption taxes. If you look at a similar ballot initiative in California about 10 years ago, they were able to pair an increase in the top earning tax bracket with an increase in the sales tax. Similarly, tariffs, if anything, are a tax on consumption of foreign goods (not foreigners!), and someone just unilaterally increased those.
For the prototypical social democratic countries in Scandinavia, it's worth nothing that they pay for generous programs with broad-based consumption taxes such as a VAT. (As a side bar, these countries often score highly on economic freedom despite high government spending / high tax burden because they otherwise support more free market policies)
Yeah, no shit. I wish self-proclaimed audit fans would actually do the audits and compile lists of recommended spending cuts/reallocations rather than wax poetically about "waste" which is itself a waste of everyone's time.
That raising taxes is hard is worth remembering when people say we ought to just increase transfers to people for housing in place of some kind of rent control.
Medicaid should not be means tested, but in fact expanded and the states should have no option to opt. The ACA needs to be refunded so it is a lot easier to use and more affordable. The other benefit should be means tested but there should be an incentive to provide more for families . I think even republicans will go for it if we pitch the experimental as being family friendly. Free transit is has problems, look at the experience of DC. I think it probably not very cost effective. Fares are pretty low and maybe a means tested supply could help if the really poorest riders to benefit from the system.
Speaking as a Biden (never Trump) / no crossover from IL, my rationale was they were willing to amend the constitution to tax me more, but were not willing to amend the constitution to modify the run-away pension plans. Had they put both initiatives on the ballot, I would’ve been more willing to consider the more progressive rate.
One issue Matt Y omitted here is the stupidity of the government making spending decisions via ballot measure.
We get this in California: a ballot measure that says, e.g., “Do you support n amount of money going to coastal habitat preservation and climate resilience measures over the next decade, funded by [increase in existing tax][a new tax on x]?” And I’m like, I favor habitat preservation and climate resilience, but what is the opportunity cost here? What could that money go to instead, and is that need more pressing? It’s silly to expect voters to make budget decisions like this.
This doesn't help the state government of California make better budgeting decisions or see the big picture of the state finances; it's just an opinion poll on whether more voters are like "yayyyy coastal habitats" or "boooo more taxes."
I've decided to vote against every ballot proposal that comes up in Florida unless it specifically overturns or removes some provision of the state Constitution. My "no" vote is my small way of trying to tell the State Representatives to do their job.
Voting on proposals, weighing tradeoffs, negotiating compromises is why they represent me. I don't vote for proposals, I vote for a representative to do the work.
I remain convinced that the end result of many years of lowering taxes for various interest groups (no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security, no tax on left handed people, etc) is that the end state is all taxes are to be paid by one ugly guy named Steve who works in accounting that nobody likes.
First of all, I found "Figure 1" completely incomprehensible. To a naive reader, which is pretty much me, the official poverty rate has fallen from .2% to .1%, which certainly is good news. I guess that isn't what it says, but the "Notes" were also completely incomprehensible as well. I have seen plenty of "good" figures showing that the official poverty rate is "misleading" (which is why liberals like it so much) that were easy to understand. I can't imagine where you got this one.
Regarding defense spending, I think you are way off in thinking that we spend so little that, in effect, there's no money there. It's just that our GDP has grown so "insanely" that a 2025 defense budget of $849 billion looks "tiny". In an ideal world, which is not the one we live in, we could cut that in half. China's 2025 defense budget is $246 billion. Because the U.S. is so compulsively pugnacious, we have "trapped" ourselves (supposedly) into a situation where we have to continue to spend enormous amounts of cash. But three times our "enemy", a country that is not really our enemy? The money is there. It's just untouchable.
The irony about raising taxes being hard, Republicans don't seem to mind at all raising taxes, so long as the taxes are targeted at people who are Democrats, at least the subset of Democrats with above-average incomes.
For example, the limit on SALT deductions matters most for people in blue states. The limit on home mortgage interest deduction matters most for people who buy homes in cities with high housing costs, most of whom are Democrats. The house bill to make EV drivers pay a 3X the road tax of gas car drivers was made with full knowledge that EV drivers are predominantly Democrats.
At the end of the day, it's a culture war battle. Nobody on either side wants to raise taxes on people they believe to be the "real Americans", but they do want the "enemies" to pay more in taxes so that the "real Americans" can get services for less. For the Democrats, the "enemies" are the billionaires. For the Republicans, the "enemies" are Democrats (or, at least, the subset of Democrats with above-average incomes, but not high enough to be rich).
When did we just give up on cutting healthcare costs?
Is there any data on voters being more willing to support tax increases in places with better governance/less corruption?
One of my many gripes with the DOGE-foolery that we did for the first half of the year is that there really are a lot of brokenly inefficient/wasteful things done by the federal government, and it would be nice to have people make a serious attempt at fixing that stuff, instead of trying to win Twitter every day with BS "discoveries" of waste, fraud, and abuse.
I suspect taxes would go down much much easier if they just disappeared from your paycheck and there was no long tax return process. If we just taxed wages (just as progressively as income) before it was given to the worker so they never even heard about it I think people would find it less upsetting.
I mean lots of people seem willing to believe that taxes on wages that are 'paid' by the employer aren't paid by them.
It astounds me how much people seem to care about this... I rarely even look at my paystubs unless something seems egregious. Whereas I can see the tariffs in evidence in the price rise on collectibles quite easily.
One of the things that makes me so sad about all of this is how hard it is to get people to realize that if everyone was taxed more and that tax was phases in gradually things wouldn't feel any worse.
The price of our biggest expense -- housing is determined by what other people can pay so taxing everyone doesn't change what you can afford (unf construction costs are rarely driving the prices). And even most other consumption affects us only in how it relates to what we are used to and that of others. In other words we care about improving over time and keeping up with the Joneses and relatively little about absolute consumption. It's not like we are way happier than we were in the 50s even though we are massively objectively wealthier in inflation adjusted terms.
---
So I've come to the unhappy conclusion that people just aren't going to be rational about this and the only way forwards is to exploit that. For some reason people don't seem to think of regulations or taxes on corporations as being a tax they are paying so as much as I believe in theory you tax the shareholders and the people a corporation pays maybe we just have to eat the economic losses to taxing corporations because people just think about money and taxes emotionally.
I know easier said than done, but isn’t a huge problem here that we (in the US, but I’m also thinking NYC given the primary) are so bad and inefficient at spending tax dollars? Like we should hypothetically be able to have a fantastic social democracy with great universal programs given our tax rates and revenue, but we just allocate the funds *terribly*
Raising (income) taxes is hard. People seem to be more OK with land/property taxes or consumption taxes. If you look at a similar ballot initiative in California about 10 years ago, they were able to pair an increase in the top earning tax bracket with an increase in the sales tax. Similarly, tariffs, if anything, are a tax on consumption of foreign goods (not foreigners!), and someone just unilaterally increased those.
For the prototypical social democratic countries in Scandinavia, it's worth nothing that they pay for generous programs with broad-based consumption taxes such as a VAT. (As a side bar, these countries often score highly on economic freedom despite high government spending / high tax burden because they otherwise support more free market policies)
Yeah, no shit. I wish self-proclaimed audit fans would actually do the audits and compile lists of recommended spending cuts/reallocations rather than wax poetically about "waste" which is itself a waste of everyone's time.
Wait. So according to that chart, the poverty rate after taxes and in-kind transfers in 1961 was 60 percent? I don't buy it.
There's a massive methodology problem hiding in that chart somewhere.
That raising taxes is hard is worth remembering when people say we ought to just increase transfers to people for housing in place of some kind of rent control.
Is it just me or is it not possibly increase font size or zoom on Slow Boring in Safari today? It works for me on all other Substacks.
Medicaid should not be means tested, but in fact expanded and the states should have no option to opt. The ACA needs to be refunded so it is a lot easier to use and more affordable. The other benefit should be means tested but there should be an incentive to provide more for families . I think even republicans will go for it if we pitch the experimental as being family friendly. Free transit is has problems, look at the experience of DC. I think it probably not very cost effective. Fares are pretty low and maybe a means tested supply could help if the really poorest riders to benefit from the system.
Speaking as a Biden (never Trump) / no crossover from IL, my rationale was they were willing to amend the constitution to tax me more, but were not willing to amend the constitution to modify the run-away pension plans. Had they put both initiatives on the ballot, I would’ve been more willing to consider the more progressive rate.
One issue Matt Y omitted here is the stupidity of the government making spending decisions via ballot measure.
We get this in California: a ballot measure that says, e.g., “Do you support n amount of money going to coastal habitat preservation and climate resilience measures over the next decade, funded by [increase in existing tax][a new tax on x]?” And I’m like, I favor habitat preservation and climate resilience, but what is the opportunity cost here? What could that money go to instead, and is that need more pressing? It’s silly to expect voters to make budget decisions like this.
This doesn't help the state government of California make better budgeting decisions or see the big picture of the state finances; it's just an opinion poll on whether more voters are like "yayyyy coastal habitats" or "boooo more taxes."
I've decided to vote against every ballot proposal that comes up in Florida unless it specifically overturns or removes some provision of the state Constitution. My "no" vote is my small way of trying to tell the State Representatives to do their job.
Voting on proposals, weighing tradeoffs, negotiating compromises is why they represent me. I don't vote for proposals, I vote for a representative to do the work.
I remain convinced that the end result of many years of lowering taxes for various interest groups (no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security, no tax on left handed people, etc) is that the end state is all taxes are to be paid by one ugly guy named Steve who works in accounting that nobody likes.
Change that to "one ugly guy named Elon who works in SpaceX/Tesla that nobody likes," and you've got yourself a deal! 😉
First of all, I found "Figure 1" completely incomprehensible. To a naive reader, which is pretty much me, the official poverty rate has fallen from .2% to .1%, which certainly is good news. I guess that isn't what it says, but the "Notes" were also completely incomprehensible as well. I have seen plenty of "good" figures showing that the official poverty rate is "misleading" (which is why liberals like it so much) that were easy to understand. I can't imagine where you got this one.
Regarding defense spending, I think you are way off in thinking that we spend so little that, in effect, there's no money there. It's just that our GDP has grown so "insanely" that a 2025 defense budget of $849 billion looks "tiny". In an ideal world, which is not the one we live in, we could cut that in half. China's 2025 defense budget is $246 billion. Because the U.S. is so compulsively pugnacious, we have "trapped" ourselves (supposedly) into a situation where we have to continue to spend enormous amounts of cash. But three times our "enemy", a country that is not really our enemy? The money is there. It's just untouchable.