From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 21:00:29 MDT
At 11:27 PM 7/6/02 -0700, Samantha wrote:
>Well, my biggest gripe with taxes is that those "teeny slices"
>add up to over 60% of my income! I have a very difficult time
>that believing I should devote 60% of my renumeration to
>purposes chosen by others. There just aren't that many people
>who have a better idea how to spend my money imho.
You're not taking my point (assuming I have one, and I'm not sure I have,
not having done the numbers).
Some proportion of that 60% is surely spent on public works that you *do*
require (air traffic regulation, dams, etc). Some goes to the kind of
general welfare almost everyone here would applaud, even if they'd rather
do it on some other basis: e.g. the vast military system that makes the USA
the mighty power it is today, tah rah! How much *doesn't* go to such
programs? And how much expenditure *is* paid from the common purse for
causes you endorse that many *other* people would find irrelevant or
hateful? (Central funding for science and technology, astronomy for example
and space flight.) I'm not trying to argue that these goods might not be
funded in a different kind of economic system (although they might not;
many people are remarkably narrow in their vision); I'm asking how much
you're shelling out this way that you wouldn't have to spend anyway, if you
were doing it piecemeal. Yes, it might be better for the soul to do it item
by item; it might force all those lazy sods who stand in the cold rain and
hot sun maintaining the roads to do an honest day's work, etc etc. But
that's a somewhat different issue.
Damien Broderick
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