my main argument is extremely simple. The government currently takes more than half of "my" income. The problem is not the amount of money they take it, its how poorly they use the money they already receive.
Actually, in 2013, the Federal revenue was equivalent to a flat-income-tax rate of 29.97% on all taxable income excluding benefits paid from welfare (generally the government counts food stamps, unemployment, and social security as taxable income--which is ridiculous, because your straight income comes from productive work and represents a portion of wealth-creation; welfare income is taken from that and handed to someone else, and taxing it only re-taxes money which originated from
productive work done somewhere else. Welfare is a government service paid for out of your productive output, and taxing it is ridiculous).
Federal spending was higher than that. Deficit spending is okay so long as it's slower than inflation--if the debt grows slower than its inflation adjustment, then its purchasing power is shrinking, thus you're getting out of debt. We had some years where we were growing debt for real; we're about at-pace with inflation now, last I checked.
I don't think anyone would argue that the (just about every) government is not very efficient when it comes to spending our taxes and I think that is what really irks just about everyone.
Actually, that's not true. The government does some inefficient things, at least in the narrow view; and it also operates extremely-efficiently at many things.
In some large part, certain government services are only efficient as government services. This can be absolute--roads, police forces, and military defense--or it can be economic. High-wealth societies (high degree of technology) expend less on medical care, and are thus more-efficient with things like single-payer healthcare systems--optimized by having mandatory employer-provided healthcare to create market forces (consumers want low-price goods, employers want low-cost and so argue for low-price health insurance, insurance suppliers want low healthcare costs, and healthcare providers have an absolute cost floor and cannot go below a certain price), then using that negotiated healthcare pricing as a benchmark in single-payer negotiation. Low-wealth societies are actually less-efficient and unable to supply this, and have to take a strategy where the poor just get sick and die or else they end up spreading poverty without any real way to even supply the healthcare they're trying to mandate. Such considerations are usually ignored in favor of idealism in political discussions.
In another part, though, government organizations are surprisingly-efficient, both in absolute and relative terms. Large governments have large tax bases and can take on expensive projects, so a $3 million upgrade of systems costs the 153,000,000 American workers 1.96 cents each while controlling expansion of administrative overhead to the tune of a dozen $80,000/year workers. I've seen US government approaches to major operational projects, and many administrations are highly-effective in execution of major projects. Those organizations
also idle a lot of their work force, so often seem inefficient because there really is a lot of waste.
When I moved into the private sector, I was... confused, to say the least. The lack of proper project management in enormous companies pulling multi-billion-dollar profits meant a lot of repeat work, failure, support calls, down time, lost revenues, and repeated purchasing of hardware to replace hardware that was inadequately spec'ed the first time. I saw higher than 80% project failure rates, meaning a department with a $10 million budget was spending less than $2 million on anything useful, and $8 million on work that produced no result and was ultimately abandoned; and the successful projects wastefully applied resources and strung themselves out for years instead of months.
I've also watched those businesses reorganize, apply new management processes, and cut down failure rates and turn-around times massively. I've seen SLAs become feasible. I've seen projects that lumbered along for half a decade get restarted, organized, and completed in 4-6 months. The inefficiencies are falling away.
It's strange to watch how governments operate; it's even stranger to consider how very bad some large businesses are at doing anything. Sometimes it's hard to even determine what problems are real. My basic litmus test is to look at business net profit margins: if a major road construction business is pulling 70% net profit margins, then the government is overpaying for roads; if it's pulling 10% profit margins, then all the anomalies like dragging their feet to draw out their contracts and siphon more government money are just ways to distort the per-hour price--negotiating a below-cost hourly contact price and inflating the hours required to hit profitability. That's a good starting point because it actually tells you what contract work costs
and most people are concerned with how much the government will pay for things they think they could buy for less--the question is, are those prices really over-inflated, and are we being scammed out of our tax money?
The real problem with governments is their impact on the economy at large. Regulations, welfare, and core services are required to maximize efficiency; figuring out
what regulations, welfare, and core services we need for the maximum efficiency is hard. On one end, we have USSR-style failures where the government tries to dictate the economy and fails; on the other, we have anarcho-capitalism where we let the free market do everything and end up with a bunch of inefficient garbage and an eventual megacorporation buying it all up and becoming the de-facto government due to (of all things) superior efficiency in certain central authorities. The perfect balance continuously moves, as well, so we aren't going to discover the magic formula and live happily ever after.
Author
Topic: CA EV gas tax proposals (Read 1090 times)