this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Lefty Memes
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If you just print money to fund a program that has a greater return on investment (ie: schools -> increased productivity, housing the homeless increasing their productivity, reducing waste to "crime" and paying police to harass people, etc), then the money per real asset can actually decrease from "just print money" and have the opposite effect in the long-term (and if these types of things are constantly being funded, then now is the "long term" from earlier investments anyways).
That can be a little tricky though. Are you creating money to pay for education, or are you creating money so consumers can buy bigger SUVs instead of paying the taxes that should be used to cover education?
Why choose inflation when you can just as easily raise other taxes?
I'm sure you agree with me that increasing taxes on inheritance, property, capital gains or really high income would be more efficient than printing money.
It's not choosing inflation. As pointed out, it could actually be deflationary depending how how the money is printed. Funding services and taxing the wealthy are two separate issues. Taxes have nothing to do with funding services and are only used as an excuse to not have universal health care or to much on climate change, both of which could be deflationary if funded by just printing money and doing nothing is inflationary.
Of course I also don't think billionaires should exist because they are separately harmful and only are possibly with exploitation. So I don't particularly have a problem with using taxes as a weapon to combat that symptom of the exploitive system, but it's like using paracetamol to treat an infection - its just treating the symptoms, which might be important to not die immediately and to be able to recover, but ideally you also treat the infection directly and then form antibodies to prevent future infections or have other external chances to reduce infectivity. So I'm not opposing taxes, but generally they are a distraction from other issues and meant to bore people by forcing advocates of such policies to waste time talking about boring specific tax policies rather than building a narrative about a better tomorrow.
Taxes don't fund government expenses
Elaborate, please