In the liberal imagination, taxes work something like this:
“Rich people earn lots of money. Some of them use some of that money in bad ways. So the government taxes them, taking away some of their money and redistributing some of that to useful things that help people who don’t have as much as the rich.”
In this formulation, taxes are a mechanism to make the rich “pay their fair share” and fund socially necessary public goods.
But that’s not actually how redistributive taxes work! Instead, it goes something like this:
“The state uses violence to facilitate exploitation by the rich of the working class. The rich take so much from the working class that members of the working class might die from destitution. To keep enough workers alive for the rich to continue exploiting, the state caps how much the rich can take, requiring the rich to give a little bit back in the form of taxes.”
In the presence of capitalism, welfare spending is certainly preferable to no welfare spending. But that welfare spending by the state would not be necessary if the state didn’t first facilitate capitalist exploitation. The rich *do not pay for welfare.* They’re simply not allowed to steal as much.
@HeavenlyPossum A slight tangent but it's interesting how misunderstood tax brackets are, at least how they work here in the uk (and back in NZ it was the same).
People near a tax bracket complain that their next payrise would cause them to take less money home after tax, not understanding the new tax is only on money in that bracket. I sometimes wonder if it was structured in a way to confuse more people into shouting down taxes.
David Graeber made the same point in his essay “Against Economics”—our tax systems are deliberately confusing and inefficient because they allow elites to expand the bureaucratic state while pretending to be for “small government” by making everyone frustrated with taxes.
@PossiblyMax @HeavenlyPossum It’s really not a complex idea though. It should be taught in schools as part of civics. Yknow, learning to live in society. I know I wasn’t taught about marginal tax rates at school, but thankfully my parents taught me. I’m sure many didn’t get taught it by anyone though, for whatever reason.
You’re assuming that schools exist to prepare us to be good citizens and not, say, obedient workers.
@HeavenlyPossum @PossiblyMax @Brendanjones I love teaching. I hate regular schools. Because of this. Even when you are trying to teach kids to think and BE, the hidden curriculum and system setup are fighting to keep them as conforming, behaving underlings.
@GinevraCat @Brendanjones @PossiblyMax
Yup. Your caring labor is expropriated as surely as any other worker’s.
@HeavenlyPossum @PossiblyMax Well yeah, *should* was the operative word there, and it was doing a lot of work ;)
@Brendanjones @HeavenlyPossum Hah yes it really was