— JuliaRose (@penandpaper5659) August 25, 2022
Via woke loser Dan Price, Julia here seems to think that comparing two similar numbers means anything. It's a fun game, though a bit meaningless, even if the numbers were accurate (they weren't: the tax cut was $1.5T over ten years and "the rich" and "corporations" weren't the only beneficiaries while the student loan plan was $400B of the $1.6T in total student loans).
The basic fact remains that all tax cuts are morally good and all subsidized loan forgiveness plans are morally reprehensible.
Taxes, remember, are money stolen from you by the government. As Michael Huemer pointed out years ago, even if you like what you are given in return it doesn't change that fundamental fact (and many of course actively dislike what you get in return).
Imagine that I hold you up at gunpoint and take $20 from you. I also leave one of my books behind in exchange. When you see me later without my gun, you call me a thief and demand your money back. “Oh no,” I say, “I am no thief, for I gave you something valuable in exchange. True, you never asked for the book, but it’s a good book, worth much more than $20.”This reply on my part would be confused. It doesn’t matter that I gave you a good in exchange, and it doesn’t matter whether the book is really worth more than $20. What matters is that I took your money without your consent.
It also does not matter if you benefit greatly from the book. Suppose that (unable to convince me to take it back) you wind up reading my book, which turns out to contain such useful advice that you end up much better off (including financially better off) than before I came along. None of this changes the fact that I am a thief. The temporal order also does not matter: if I give you the unsolicited book first, then wait for you to profit from it financially, and then forcibly take away some of the money you earned, I will still be a thief.
Obviously then, the government taking that stolen tax money and giving it to people as a "reward" for making bad choices with their own money earlier is a much less beneficial process. This is caused even moreso by the fact that already the government isn't getting the "fair share" of taxes from these student loan deadbeats in the first place. The IRS already provides income tax deductions for student loan payments, plus there's the unfair ("progressive") tax code that also means the same unemployed or underemployed deadbeats who are clamouring for the student loan forgiveness weren't paying their fair share of taxes to begin with.
Yet again, the productive class is robbed, and the layabout drifters and grifters get rewarded. There is literally nothing "free market" about such a program, and so it's somewhat confusing that Dan Price doesn't notice that something that's kind of free market (government stealing less of your money) cannot be compared to things which aren't at all free market (government loan forgiveness). Does Price do this with other things as well?
Of course, one of the problems with tax cuts in a progressive system is that since the poor already don't pay their fair share of taxes, any cuts to taxes automatically benefits "the rich" in what the media laughingly call "disproportionately" (when in fact it was just correcting an earlier unfair disproportion).
Which is why, as I've noted many a time before, the only fair tax is a flat tax.
There's one "resource" that every person either rich or poor has in equal abundance: time. We all have 8760 hours every year in which to work, play, dance, shit, shower, screw, sleep, invest, paint, walk the dog, and play Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's up to every individual to decide how to best use those various hours of the year, and in the end the revenue-generating ones that benefit the economy are generally expressed almost perfectly in the price of their labour (this assumes, of course, that there aren't nonsensical things in the way like minimum wage laws or government industry regulations that impede on these activities. the flat tax serves as a great justification to ditch them, too). The thing that gets taxed equally is time. The Fraser Institute's famous tax freedom day becomes painfully clear in a flat tax world. When the flat tax is 10%, you work for the government for six minutes an hour and then you get the other 54. If the flat tax is 20%, you work for the government for 12 minutes and hour and the other 48 are yours. It is, in essence, the most fair of any tax system you could possibly devise.
I've shown my support for a fair taxation system. Has Julia Rose? Nope.
It's worth noting that even a flat tax isn't strictly speaking "free market", and that's true if the flat tax rate is 3%, 10%, or 92%. It's still stealing money from the pockets of those who earned it. Think of the actual tax rate being the difference between pirating a Hollywood blockbuster and pirating a supply ship off the Gulf of Aden: the victim of the piracy has a lot less to worry about in one case than the other. A flat tax just means that you're pirating equally off every movie studio and/or shipping company. You could still be hitting 92% of all the global marine traffic and crippling the world, but at least one firm isn't excluded as it would be if you only stole 27% of global marine traffic but 92% of Everygreen's and 1% of Hapag-Lloyd's (which would be unfair).
As the post title notes, of course, a 0% tax rate is extremely free market (and by definition perfectly flat). Again I don't see Dan Price or Julia Rose signing on, which is why they shouldn't be thinking they have some sort of moral or intellectual high ground.
