I've made a personal attempt in the last year or so to try to drive the speed limit. Because I'm also at times a cyclist, and I hate when cars speed by me.
I feel like road speeds is an example of a thing that has undergone a collapse in voluntary compliance. Everyone knows you won't be punished for driving 5, 10, or even in some places, 20 mph over the speed limit, so they do it.
And when people do get a ticket, they view it as bad luck that they got caught and less as an inevitable outcome from unsafe driving.
I wonder how long it would take for anti-government conservatives to start arguing it's your moral duty to cheat on taxes and that nobody expects you to follow the rules, like how many drivers nowadays argue "it's safer to go with the flow of traffic" and "nobody expects you to actually obey the speed limit"
On a side note a post like this, which is basically, "a thing Trump/GOP is doing is bad as opposed to a good thing the Democrat's did" is why, despite Matt's Twitter/Bluesky personage at times is why this comment section hasn't fallen into the mess that seemingly befalls any Substack comment section outside of here and The Bulwark.
Nice piece, as usual, except for the Donald Rumsfeld quote. His letter also refers to his "accountants". Anyone who has "accountants" has no right to complain about the complexity of the tax code. Rumsfeld was a very accomplished businessman who had probably a dozen substantial income streams, enjoying any number of tax breaks specifically written into the tax code to benefit people like him. The odds are also very good that he set a variety of trusts to avoid paying estate taxes, while also maintaining a variety of tax shelters on the side. We should all have such problems, and if we did we certainly should not expect people to feel sorry for us, nor put on a smug show at the expense of a hapless IRS assigned by Congress the task of making "sense" out of all the goodies it tucked away in the Internal Revenue Code for big shots like Big Donnie.
An unfortunate consequence of all this is it will take a lot longer to get an IRS rep on the phone. I had two occasions in the last five years where I had to call the IRS. The first was in 2020 and I had an interminable wait time. The second was two years ago, after Biden's IRS had done a lot of hiring, and I waited less than two minutes.
Anybody talking about DOGE without mentioning that we are sure to lose three times even their bullshit inflated claims of cost savings via the legalization of tax evasion needs to... um, talk better.
MY gets at this a little, but the most pernicious thing about defunding the tax police is how it reduces trust in society. You feel like more and more a sucker for following the rules. It begets FOMO for cheating on your taxes.
Like most other things about MAGA, it pushes us away from being a high-trust society and closer to a banana republic.
So I’ve noticed a very disturbing idea floating around that the debt is unpayable because it’s 350k per worker. But if one wants to use debt per worker one would also have to use GDP per worker which for 2024 was $182,962.
And actually the national debt is $36 trillion so / 164 million workers gets us to $219,512.
Are they lying, are they idiots, does some idiot just post some plausible numbers on the internet that just get repeated unquestioningly?
I would assume that Jeff Bezos already gets plenty of attention from the IRS. This is about scrutinizing your neighbor the contractor who might use his work truck to drop the kids at school on the way to a job site. We need tax reform, not an army of IRS agents.
Ok, since you asked, here’s my spiel on the Land Value Tax. Copy-and-paste from what I’ve posted before since I am not creative enough to restate it any better…
Replace all existing taxes with the Land Value Tax (also known as the Single Tax) that was proposed in the 19th century by journalist Henry George in his book “Progress and Poverty”. As the name implies, it’s a tax on the value of land. Unlike a “property tax”, it would apply only to land, not buildings.
Advantages
- Simple to define and enforce. The tax would be “x” percent of assessed land value, no exceptions. You can try to hide income (or pad expenses), but you can’t hide land.
- Progressive and pro-growth. The wealthy owners of high-priced land and would pay a disproportionate share of the taxes, but the marginal tax on both income and consumption would be ZERO – a win-win for both progressives and free-market conservatives (if there still is such a thing in the age of tariffs).
Henry George believed that the money you earn from your business, labor or profession belongs to you 100%, but the value of your land is due not so much to your own efforts but to the value of the surrounding community and is therefore fair game to be taxed to support the “community” (which could be defined as city, state or a nation).
Could the Land Value Tax raise enough revenue? If my math is right, taxing all private land in the US at an average* of 19 cents a square foot would raise $12 trillion, which is equal to the current combined budget of the federal government and all state and local governments.
*emphasize “average”; the rate would be higher in Manhattan, NYC, lower in Manhattan, Kansas.
"the sense that a shady-looking return might be scrutinized motivates voluntary compliance"
That is certainly a bold euphemism given that this is literally the opposite of a "voluntary" situation!
"every dollar spent in 2025 is going to need to be paid for one way or another, no matter how low tax collections drop"
Ideally, we wouldn't have a government engaged in profligate spending. But given where we are, I really hope it's eventually paid for on the backs of those enabling the irresponsible behavior - the people who are actually paying for that spending today *voluntarily* by buying treasuries. Anyone dumb enough to think it's sustainable or unethical enough to be buying instruments that derive their "value" from the ability to coerce more money out of future taxpayers deserves a good dose of market discipline. Just sucks that the knock-on effects are going to hurt everyone, not just the people who deserve it.
"The US government should default on its debts, rather than raising revenue, because of moral desert" is absolutely incredible. A real gem of "Huh, I guess if you just totally divorce yourself from outcomes you might actually think this." If I was still teaching philosophy I would steal this to force students to analyze how you might try to disprove it from a variety of perspectives.
Ah yes, philosophy, a field famously devoid of anarchists or anyone who thinks that we should do the right thing, even if it is costly, because of how "disproved" they've been...
No you're absolutely correct that philosophy has a lot of people whose impulse is to prefer moral intuition over outcomes. The goal of any instruction in formal moral philosophy is to either disabuse them of this idea or to adopt some rigorous system that has to actually be defended which commits them to certain moral principles.
As far as anarchists go, I suspect there are many fewer of them in actual field of philosophy than there are in "philosophy" fields like X Studies or non-empirical economics departments.
The greatest (as in large or immense) Simpsons Did It of all time declared that "we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. [https://frinkiac.com/caption/S11E17/596360] So this will be one of several ways that it will manifest...
Friends of mine say/post stuff like this all of the time and it really blows my mind. Like if you think through the implications of living in a country with no ability to collect taxes then you're likely living in a really poor and dysfunctional society. The ability to collect taxes is basically what separates the first world and third world and very few people would want to live in third world countries - but maybe they assume they'd be rich enough to not feel the difference.
I said to a friend of mine a few months ago "I don't think there will be any taxes soon" and it's a good thing Thomas Friedman wasn't there to overheat it.
It's California and he can afford guns and ammo. Hard to know which side of the limit he's on. And also the question of whether he's already lying on his taxes and is hoping the IRS collapses before they catch him.
Kay's comment suggests someone who has never used LLMs. Their loss honestly.
I've made a personal attempt in the last year or so to try to drive the speed limit. Because I'm also at times a cyclist, and I hate when cars speed by me.
I feel like road speeds is an example of a thing that has undergone a collapse in voluntary compliance. Everyone knows you won't be punished for driving 5, 10, or even in some places, 20 mph over the speed limit, so they do it.
And when people do get a ticket, they view it as bad luck that they got caught and less as an inevitable outcome from unsafe driving.
I wonder how long it would take for anti-government conservatives to start arguing it's your moral duty to cheat on taxes and that nobody expects you to follow the rules, like how many drivers nowadays argue "it's safer to go with the flow of traffic" and "nobody expects you to actually obey the speed limit"
I'm starting to think the Democrats could nominate Mahmoud Khalil in 2028 and still win.
"Trump is so unpopular it doesn't matter who we run."
on polymarket the (already high) odds of a carney victory have ticked up sharply in the last couple days. what gives?
On a side note a post like this, which is basically, "a thing Trump/GOP is doing is bad as opposed to a good thing the Democrat's did" is why, despite Matt's Twitter/Bluesky personage at times is why this comment section hasn't fallen into the mess that seemingly befalls any Substack comment section outside of here and The Bulwark.
Are all those w2 employees capturing their medical mileage every year? Taxes aren’t simple here at any level.
Very few people are not taking the standard deduction.
Do I understand correctly that Matt has a second kitchen in his house that's part of his home office? Must be nice.
Nice piece, as usual, except for the Donald Rumsfeld quote. His letter also refers to his "accountants". Anyone who has "accountants" has no right to complain about the complexity of the tax code. Rumsfeld was a very accomplished businessman who had probably a dozen substantial income streams, enjoying any number of tax breaks specifically written into the tax code to benefit people like him. The odds are also very good that he set a variety of trusts to avoid paying estate taxes, while also maintaining a variety of tax shelters on the side. We should all have such problems, and if we did we certainly should not expect people to feel sorry for us, nor put on a smug show at the expense of a hapless IRS assigned by Congress the task of making "sense" out of all the goodies it tucked away in the Internal Revenue Code for big shots like Big Donnie.
An unfortunate consequence of all this is it will take a lot longer to get an IRS rep on the phone. I had two occasions in the last five years where I had to call the IRS. The first was in 2020 and I had an interminable wait time. The second was two years ago, after Biden's IRS had done a lot of hiring, and I waited less than two minutes.
Anybody talking about DOGE without mentioning that we are sure to lose three times even their bullshit inflated claims of cost savings via the legalization of tax evasion needs to... um, talk better.
MY gets at this a little, but the most pernicious thing about defunding the tax police is how it reduces trust in society. You feel like more and more a sucker for following the rules. It begets FOMO for cheating on your taxes.
Like most other things about MAGA, it pushes us away from being a high-trust society and closer to a banana republic.
So I’ve noticed a very disturbing idea floating around that the debt is unpayable because it’s 350k per worker. But if one wants to use debt per worker one would also have to use GDP per worker which for 2024 was $182,962.
And actually the national debt is $36 trillion so / 164 million workers gets us to $219,512.
Are they lying, are they idiots, does some idiot just post some plausible numbers on the internet that just get repeated unquestioningly?
I would assume that Jeff Bezos already gets plenty of attention from the IRS. This is about scrutinizing your neighbor the contractor who might use his work truck to drop the kids at school on the way to a job site. We need tax reform, not an army of IRS agents.
Ok, since you asked, here’s my spiel on the Land Value Tax. Copy-and-paste from what I’ve posted before since I am not creative enough to restate it any better…
Replace all existing taxes with the Land Value Tax (also known as the Single Tax) that was proposed in the 19th century by journalist Henry George in his book “Progress and Poverty”. As the name implies, it’s a tax on the value of land. Unlike a “property tax”, it would apply only to land, not buildings.
Advantages
- Simple to define and enforce. The tax would be “x” percent of assessed land value, no exceptions. You can try to hide income (or pad expenses), but you can’t hide land.
- Progressive and pro-growth. The wealthy owners of high-priced land and would pay a disproportionate share of the taxes, but the marginal tax on both income and consumption would be ZERO – a win-win for both progressives and free-market conservatives (if there still is such a thing in the age of tariffs).
Henry George believed that the money you earn from your business, labor or profession belongs to you 100%, but the value of your land is due not so much to your own efforts but to the value of the surrounding community and is therefore fair game to be taxed to support the “community” (which could be defined as city, state or a nation).
Could the Land Value Tax raise enough revenue? If my math is right, taxing all private land in the US at an average* of 19 cents a square foot would raise $12 trillion, which is equal to the current combined budget of the federal government and all state and local governments.
*emphasize “average”; the rate would be higher in Manhattan, NYC, lower in Manhattan, Kansas.
"the sense that a shady-looking return might be scrutinized motivates voluntary compliance"
That is certainly a bold euphemism given that this is literally the opposite of a "voluntary" situation!
"every dollar spent in 2025 is going to need to be paid for one way or another, no matter how low tax collections drop"
Ideally, we wouldn't have a government engaged in profligate spending. But given where we are, I really hope it's eventually paid for on the backs of those enabling the irresponsible behavior - the people who are actually paying for that spending today *voluntarily* by buying treasuries. Anyone dumb enough to think it's sustainable or unethical enough to be buying instruments that derive their "value" from the ability to coerce more money out of future taxpayers deserves a good dose of market discipline. Just sucks that the knock-on effects are going to hurt everyone, not just the people who deserve it.
"The US government should default on its debts, rather than raising revenue, because of moral desert" is absolutely incredible. A real gem of "Huh, I guess if you just totally divorce yourself from outcomes you might actually think this." If I was still teaching philosophy I would steal this to force students to analyze how you might try to disprove it from a variety of perspectives.
Ah yes, philosophy, a field famously devoid of anarchists or anyone who thinks that we should do the right thing, even if it is costly, because of how "disproved" they've been...
No you're absolutely correct that philosophy has a lot of people whose impulse is to prefer moral intuition over outcomes. The goal of any instruction in formal moral philosophy is to either disabuse them of this idea or to adopt some rigorous system that has to actually be defended which commits them to certain moral principles.
As far as anarchists go, I suspect there are many fewer of them in actual field of philosophy than there are in "philosophy" fields like X Studies or non-empirical economics departments.
I’ve read some crazy shit on the internet but that was one impressive comment in terms of sheer lunacy.
The greatest (as in large or immense) Simpsons Did It of all time declared that "we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. [https://frinkiac.com/caption/S11E17/596360] So this will be one of several ways that it will manifest...
Overheard at the gun range in Sacramento: "I can't wait until Trump gets rid of the IRS and I don't have to pay income tax anymore."
An incredible "imagine a guy" moment. Of course, that's not the place to bring up politics but people really do believe this stuff.
Friends of mine say/post stuff like this all of the time and it really blows my mind. Like if you think through the implications of living in a country with no ability to collect taxes then you're likely living in a really poor and dysfunctional society. The ability to collect taxes is basically what separates the first world and third world and very few people would want to live in third world countries - but maybe they assume they'd be rich enough to not feel the difference.
I said to a friend of mine a few months ago "I don't think there will be any taxes soon" and it's a good thing Thomas Friedman wasn't there to overheat it.
The funniest would be if his household income is like $75k and he has no federal tax due as it is.
It's California and he can afford guns and ammo. Hard to know which side of the limit he's on. And also the question of whether he's already lying on his taxes and is hoping the IRS collapses before they catch him.