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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

There was a point where financing the government was a patriotic act. People would give other people War Bonds as presents. But now the patriotic thing is to trash talk which ever party is in the administration and wax poetic about governmental corruption. You can't have it both ways. You can't say no to financing your government and scorn corruption. Either you're okay paying for your government, you're okay with someone else paying for your government (to possibly include other governments!), or you're okay with your government paying for itself with printed money. (That last option, seignorage, leads to hyperinflation.)

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The government needs better PR frankly, instead of allowing itself to be a punching bag all day. Nobody can even imagine how many things the government and your tax dollars provide.

I was thinking about this recently when I filed my taxes.

Maybe if they provided some kind of itemized receipt? "You paid $x in taxes. This was distributed as $y to infrastructure, $z to education, $w to defense" etc.

Your tax dollar don't pay for $y, $z or $w. You pay for the national debt mostly at this point. The government overspends and gets its money either from debt or from over printing. Even if top 10 of fortune 500 paid 100% taxes, it would still not cover spending. Just saying.

Interest on the national debt is a small portion of the US budget:

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Even if you just look at discretionary spending, debt payments are not a large portion of spending.

New borrowing is also larger than the interest payments.

There is something off with the charts on the site you refer to (they don't provide the actual numbers in the charts).

Simple calculation:

With $20T of debt, at 3% interest rate (30Y bond), the interest on the debt is adding 600 billion dollars to the deficit per year (and it compounds).

600 billion with respect to the 3.8 billion federal budget is almost 16%.

And the interest rate is so low only because debt rates have been artificially suppressed by central banks using financial tricks such QE, the Fed buying its own's governments' debt, etc.

With interest rates bound to rise sooner or later, we are sitting on a financial time bomb.

The US pays (on average) less than 3%. The debt is also just a bit less than $19 trillion.

So we save $30 billion by using the slightly smaller debt and $120 billion by using the interest rate of 2.4%.

$450 billion is still a huge budget item and it is a problem that interest rates will rise.

Soaking the exceedingly rich doesn't solve the budget deficit, true. Erasing the entire debt would be a slow and expensive process that would spread much higher taxes across most or all earners.

But you don't pay for the national debt, mostly. Recent payments on the national debt are around $420 billion - about 11% of the federal budget. God knows that's not small, but it's far from 'mostly', and 2/3 of the debt is even held inside the US.

They do this in the UK

Though there is some controversy over how it is presented:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29898083

The story contains an image of what they provide, as well as some suggestions for making it better.

My local taxes (county) do this. Whenever you pay property (house, car) taxes, it tells you $x goes to the county schools, $y to roads, and so on. (Usually including something like $0.67 to the county library!) It's really nice...sure, paying tax on my car every year isn't great, but I'm happy to give $150 (or whatever it is) to the public schools.

There's a lot of talk with respect to the US Democrat/Republican split on how Democrats are terrible at highlighting when government helps people (because it seems to cheapen the process or some silly issue.)

http://democracyjournal.org/arguments/keep-it-simple-and-tak...

I saw an interesting comment recently, from a Republican who wished for Pelosi or some other important Democrat to just say thank you. Thank you for the money, thank you for working to help these people, fund these programs, keep everything running smoothly.

It's an interesting thought. There are plenty of reasons it's not going to happen in a vacuum - if Pelosi did it tomorrow she'd be mauled by both parties. But as part of something larger? It could be incredible. William Proxmire made his career with the Golden Fleece Award, attacking stupid and wasteful spending (sometimes quite inaccurately). I don't know why there's so little effort on the left to clearly, emotionally show the good that gets done.

Imagine if every budget fight involved someone coming forward and saying "I grew up being fed on WIC. I'm a civil engineer now, and WIC helped make that possible. Out of every tax dollar you paid, I got .000002 cents. Do you really want to take that away?"

(I hope I got that math right.)

Growing up, I got free lunches in school, and in college I got the maximum Pell Grant every semester for four years straight.

I thank my lucky stars for those things and am very glad the government did it.

Of course, given the amount I pay in taxes, the government made an absolutely terrific investment. I have returned that value to it many, many times over.

All else being equal, of course I would prefer to pay lower taxes. That's what efficiency means, and the government is not very efficient.

But "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), and I kinda like civilized society.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/275/87/case.html

But then you have people who would complain because they don't want to pay for x at all. Still many people would not read it and remain ignorant.

Unfortunately, that PR has another name: Propaganda.

Progressives in particular are sensitive to the idea of the government messaging them and tend to worry about the perception. Meanwhile, private interests have no compunction against advertising heavily and constantly to get their message across. It's a huge advantage for industrial incumbents over the government.

There is a much bigger and simpler reason people stopped gifting bonds, interest rates are garbage. War bonds aren't even available right now, but there are still general government bonds and treasury bills.

The interest rate is so low on them that the growth is basically a slap in the face to whoever is receiving it and cash would be better because they could at least use it at the present time. Remember, once you buy a bond like that, the interest rate is locked in so you're stuck with the crap 2% for 27 years on the bond you bought from the government 3 years ago.

People also used to gift corporate bonds (e.g. from railroad or utility companies) and that's a dead practice as well for the same reason.

There's that last option where you would be ok with having no government at all. Although, governments usually do not offer it except maybe in Liechtenstein.

The only people who should be ok with no government are practiced warlords. The rest are naive anarchists who believe in the ability for people to peacefully self-govern or selfish libertarians who think they deserve to keep 100% of what they make regardless of how far society carried them to get their wealth.

I don't think libertarians believe they should keep 100% of their income, in an ancap world a big chunk of their money would go to private competing institutions and charities. In fact some of the biggest donors to charities (and tax payers) tend to be libertarians. Also, let's not kid ourselves, we're all selfish. That being said, not saying an ancap world would be heaven on earth, not that what we have right now is either.

Can't you be OK with contributing to the system and still talk trash about the people working in the system? The system is a separate thing from the people involved in it.

It seems like you have omitted the scenario that seems most likely by dint of the evolution of the internet: not needing a government at all.

I'm sorry but can you explain the basis of your position? I don't see how the internet makes anarchy any more feasible or likely.

Although this is a topic that needs a book-level dialogue to flesh out (and there are in fact books on the topic), in a nutshell:

The internet performs many of the functions that our species previously required government to do, but does so without the need for a centralized authority claiming a monopoly on the initiation of force, which brings with it inevitable corruption, violence, division, and victimization of the world's poor.

Seriously though, what you are advocating is the Californian Ideology, which has been tried and failed over the last 30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

See the following documentary:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-...

Defecting from the government is not an option.

Ah yes, a world led by 4chan. What a utopia that would be!

This seems to be nothing more than a strawman; I'm not sure what you are expecting as a response.

I don't think it's a straw man at all. Some people are wonderful at manipulation and organization on the internet. Certain places on 4chan are wonderful when it comes to organizing people.

The causes they take up are mostly morally questionable. If people are going to organize on the internet places like 4chan will lead the way, for whatever that means.

Sure let me know how that works out in preventing pollution at nation scale.

When stacked against the bang-up job that the US Government has done, not only on the landmass over which is claims sovereignty but the rest of the world - especially the continent of Africa - I'm certainly open to solutions other than government.

You've evidently never seen what cities and lakes were like before pollution regulation were introduced, right?

I'm from upstate NY - I grew up with superfund sites to the North, East, and West.

And yes, I'm glad that the EPA (and DoJ!) have occasionally done the right thing. But I don't think they've done the right thing often enough to suggest that the model they represent is the best humans can do.

Taxes do not finance the US government. The US government creates money to finance itself.

Taxes destroy money (and create demand for dollars, which is important :)

Hyperinflation doesn't happen when there is too much money, it happens when there isn't enough stuff to buy with it.

Lots of ignorance of monetary theory on HN!

> Taxes do not finance the US government. The US government creates money to finance itself.

Source for this claim? I've never heard this before and it sounds quite absurd.

Well in a nutshell, the US government makes the money. It can never run out. So it isn't dependent on tax revenue to spend.

So the limitations on spending are elsewhere.

This is a good intro:

http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/the-basics/us-currency-... http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/the-basics/us-currency-... http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/the-basics/us-currency-...

Also maybe:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9281

A rant on deficits:

http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/2017/01/10/deficits-mat...

For more, just look up modern monetary theory.

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