A menu of options being circulated by congressional Republicans also includes new tax cuts for corporations and the ultrawealthy.

One GOP proposal takes aim squarely at parents raising children on their own by eliminating the “head of household” filing status to reap some $200B more in taxes over a decade from single parents and other adults caring for dependents on their own.

  • kibiz0rEnglish
    52·
    3 days ago

    Taxes primarily exist to create demand for the currency.

    Let’s say we’re starting a new club with 100 members. We’ve got 5 big projects for this month, and we want to make sure all the members pitch in.

    So we say: a month from now, everyone will turn in 10 “I helped!” stickers. If you don’t, you’re out of the club.

    Then we hand out maybe 1500 “I helped!” stickers total to the leaders of the projects, to make sure there’s enough to fill the demand for 1000 stickers since we know some will do more than others and end up with more than 10 stickers.

    The leaders delegate the work out to other members, giving them stickers along with their assignments. Some members end up having scheduling conflicts, so they trade assignments between each other along with the corresponding bounty of stickers.

    The month ends, everyone turns in their stickers, and we start all over again.

    Notice a few things:

    • We’re not limited by how many stickers we get back from the members. Say we only get 800 back. We can still issue more than 800 stickers into the pool of members next month if we want to.
    • We didn’t have to ask for stickers from the members first before we could spend them out. We spent first, and taxed later.
    • We’ve got stickers left over in the economy. So now our new stickers, allocated for next month’s projects, are competing against last month’s sticker-holders. To some extent, this is healthy, because it means people who worked extra hard this month can relax a bit next month. But we don’t want too much to accumulate in the hands of too few people, or else our government spending becomes worthless.

    So taxes are important for giving people a reason to contribute and do something for each other, controlling inflation, and making sure wealth stays somewhat evenly distributed. But they’re not a prerequisite for spending.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 days ago

      I think that while the relationship between tax revenue and spend can be fuzzy, there’s only so far you can push printing the “I helped!” stickers without regard for the amount coming in before it all breaks down. Part of the value of those “I helped” stickers is knowing that the authority doesn’t just print up a few quadrillion because they felt like it, and that the volume of incoming and outgoing “stickers” is at least somewhat in the ball park of comparable, and any deviation between the two at least be steady and predictable and thus subject for planning.

      • kibiz0rEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Yep. That was point three here:

        We’ve got stickers left over in the economy. So now our new stickers, allocated for next month’s projects, are competing against last month’s sticker-holders. To some extent, this is healthy, because it means people who worked extra hard this month can relax a bit next month. But we don’t want too much to accumulate in the hands of too few people, or else our government spending becomes worthless.

        Deficits still matter, they just don’t matter in the same way that we usually see in the media when they talk about “revenue” and “spending taxpayer dollars”.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          Given that, I think the claim that there is zero need to offset spending would be pushing it too far. It might not be as simple as a naive interpretation and somewhat more flexible, but it still has a rather significant relationship that shouldn’t be neglected.