I’ve seen a few posts here on Hexbear where people lament their taxes being used for things they don’t like. I get the sentiment, but I think it’s mistaken because it’s not a zero-sum equation where the state must have a monetary revenue equal to or greater than expenditure.
In a state with monetary sovereignty, the taxes citizens pay are not what enables the state to spend money and procure weapons etc. If US citizens paid a billion less in taxes, for example, it would make no difference for military spending.
It’s also a rhetorical mistake in that it plays into right wing framing that justifies austerity, and implies the idea that the wealthy who pay more in taxes are the ones who keep society running and support the poor.
Taxes are a short hand for the consent to be governed. To question what your taxes are paying for is to question the legitimacy of the government to act on your behalf
I don’t really agree because I think this is bad politics.
You can discuss MMT on an intellectual level, but for the purposes of talking to normal people and agitating the fact that ‘American taxpayers subsidize Israel and pay trillions for Israel’s many wars of choice’ will always be a trump card.
You might say that this buys into the old paradigm of state financing and leaves you open to arguments for austerity. The problem is that you’ll be even more vulnerable if you try and skip the old paradigm entirely. You’ve gotten this response before. Blow all your cards from the getgo telling a normal person about MMT and they’ll just tell you to learn ‘basic economics instead’. This is not just ignorance on their part, its survival instincts in a society where taxes are never raised on the rich, they are raised on the poor.
Point is, don’t rest on your laurels. The fact that the state destroys money by taxing people is a very real thing that hurts the working classes most of all. The right wing exploits that feeling and you can’t let them have a monopoly over that field. Buy into the old paradigm and THEN ask why there’s austerity for regular people, but perpetual debt issuance for Israel, Wars, Arms Manufacturers, Banks, Large Landowners (‘Farmers’) and Tech Oligarchs.
Once the discussion reaches a certain level you can start treating the sovereign finance system as a common resource being pillaged by the oligarchies. But until then I’d argue that doing so from the getgo is not outmaneuvering austerity mongers, it is yielding the field to austerity. The working classes are in a perpetual spiral of ever decreasing purchasing power now. Service economies are detached from the money makers in FIRE, agriculture or industry. Money at the top only serves to speculate regular people out of their homes. All costs go up except the cost of labor. And taxes are perennially there, never targetting those at the top. If you start talking MMT to a normal person, they’ll have a gut instinct telling them that whatever claim to the truth you may have, they must defend the lower taxes agenda otherwise taxes will be raised on them. Again.
I don’t like the idea of conceding the language entirely. It would be more accurate to talk about “public money”, as that is what it’s supposed to be in a democracy anyway.
When making this post I was mainly thinking about the way people on Hexbear talk about it on the site, rather than how we might go about it when persuading people IRL.
It’s also a rhetorical mistake in that it plays into right wing framing that justifies austerity
why, I want my taxes to go to like social care and building trains. It’s a shorthand for “the state has a limited amount of ressources” entirely removed from the specific system and that’s where I want it to put them
this is only true for federal policy and federal taxes.
smaller administrative designations (states/counties or provinces, etc) don’t print money and either don’t or rarely have a public bank they can use to finance public projects.
the quantity and quality of public services at the state, county/municipal level is very much tied to tax policy. the cops, the schools, the libraries, etc are all funded by local and state taxes with only occaisional injections of one-off federal grants to build capacity. but many public institutions are expected to pay for themselves through state/local taxes and fees for service.
If I say “Isn’t it such shit that our tax money goes to bombs and guns instead of hospitals and schools, and in fact those bombs and guns are so that we can blow up hospitals and schools in countries that have never been a threat to us?”
And the person I’m talking to responds, “Yeah we should do austerity, the wealthy can’t keep babysitting the rest of society.”
I can be reasonably assured that I wasn’t going to be getting anywhere with that person, and they were never worth my time.
I feel like we should take it in stride that libs are susceptible to certain rhetoric only, and we should work towards refining that rhetoric, but the “taxes for bombs” argument is pretty effective for the average person who really only cares about cost of living issues, I don’t think we should throw it out entirely.
I’m open to alternative approaches of course.
I agree, complaining about taxes in the way you describe is
especially in the US where the government can fund itself through its exorbitant privilege of dollar printing and infinite debt. An economics understander can explain this better than me, but as I understand it, taxes in the US are more about controlling the volume and velocity of money in the domestic economy, with a healthy dose of class warfare mixed in. Even that is reductionist, because USians also pay taxes to state and local governments who do not have the direct ability to print dollars. So taxes do, at the state and local level, behave similarly to e.g. EU countries who necessarily must balance their budgets.
see also: Michael Hudson
I just don’t think it adds much to our messaging to be more precise and say something like “the government is spending all this money on war, and one function of your tax burden is to counteract all the extra money supply generated by that spending”. At the end of the day, even though there is no direct link between expenditure and tax revenue in the federal government, it’s not as if the two are not correlated.
Whenever I see a phrase like “taxpayer money” on Bluesky - I know the poster is a super lib.
anyone on blue sky is a super lib, isn’t that the whole point of that site
Even if you want to talk about taxes, I think this framing has it backwards. Governments put together budgets, and then taxes (and other financial tools like debt, for example) are built around paying that budget. This way suggests governments collect arbitrary tax amounts and then spend it on whatever they like, and so if it doesn’t get spent on one area it would be spent somewhere else. In fact, if it wasn’t budgeted it wouldn’t be collected at all.
This fixing still feeds into the ideologically incorrect view of money, taxpayers, and the rich floating society, however.
There is some nuance to this in that resources spent on public good tend to make the economy healthier overall so there are more resources.
Defense spending as AmeriKKKa does it does make tax spending more zero sum as the only way it pays back into economy is a few jobs making weapons.
I see your point though as your average treatlerite isn’t going to grasp nuance
You miss me because this sounds like MMT and MMT is really confusing / sounds like fake magical thinking, just from a semi-leftist point of view instead of the magical thinking from the right wing point of view that classical econ is. I would like an understanding of economics that is not based on magical thinking, and so far only Marx has seemed to have that. Please enlighten me if I am missing something. I’ve tried to understand MMT multiple times and have failed to see how it lines up with reality.
It doesn’t align with reality, but it’s a more accurate picture of how money in fed gov actually works at this time. That just means that the fed gov isn’t operating with a good understanding of reality.
The basic flow as I understand it is the gov makes whatever money it needs by printing money or getting dollars paid for bonds to foreign countries, who need dollar balances for energy and trade (increasingly less so these days, hence some of the more rabid adventurism US has been embarking on).
Since creating new money supply causes inflation, you avoid some of that via debt (bonds) and taxes, which function as a method of destroying monetary supply. Think of resource “sinks” in an MMO. There’s no, like serial code that links the money I pay in taxes, to the payment to Raytheon for a weapon; it’s all a big black box spreadsheet and you just massage it based on the outcome vibes you get out the other end. What I like about MMT is that it puts the lie to the nonstop deficit hawks. They’re not completely wrong, but it’s for the wrong reason. As long as we have a fiat currency untethered to a real asset, so like energy, it’s all made up, and essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Worth noting that this behavior is largely only functional at all because of reserve currency status and the worldwide grift/tax we exert via that. Basically we get a piece of the action across the globe where the transaction is in dollars (not exactly correct, just saying it this way to emphasize that we get financial benefit via exploitation of our currency status). Some of this function is tied up in how the gulf oil system works.
Surplusenergyeconomics.com has a very good way of explaining the disconnect between the material and financial economies. But the basic is that money = a claim on some portion of material, goods but mostly energy since that is sort of the baseline need for economy and goods, so obviously if you spin the financial market off and inflate it, as we’ve done, untethered to material reality, that claim per unit of currency keeps getting smaller and smaller—as long as enough people don’t try to cash in, it stumbles along and generates paper wealth, but the material stock/energy supply doesn’t change regardless of what your financial system is doing.
I’ve probably fucked up some of the details pretty badly there, so welcome corrections from anyone that has a better sense for my own understanding, been a moment since I was investigating it.
I have a twitter filter for ‘taxes pay’ to filter all these people out lmao
