Like Somalia or the Sudan? Oh yeah, those are the electorates we want to emulate. /sarcasm
Are you trying to justify big government spending?
Last I checked, FR was for conservatives, and nothing defines conservatism like limited government. Not accusing you, just be careful what you're really defending.
That frustration leads to an electorate who hates government spending.
Like Somalia or the Sudan? Oh yeah, those are the electorates we want to emulate. /sarcasm
You would rather emulate the EU and other countries that rely on tax systems that attempt to hide the burden from the electorate's eyes so the can tax their economies more than is othewise possible?
Every dollar tax taken out of an economy has tends to slow that economy down, the more complex and burdensome the system the greater the damage done to business activity and commerce.
Under the current complex income/payroll tax system with substantial burdens hidden from the perceptions of the largest part of the electorate, and 110 million collection points to affect our economy and standard of living is much lower than it could otherwise be.
Every dollar tax passing through our business infra-structure impedes productivity and demand by higher prices, lower wages, and lower returns on investment, in driving a tax wedge between gross prices and what our businesses can keep, and similar tax wedge between what employers must expend to hire and employee and employees are burdened in the activities of just earning what we can manage to extract for our takehome pay.
The net of those burdens on our economy and our resulting standard and cost of living is indeed no small matter.
Economic Burden of Taxation
William A. Niskanen
Presented October 2003
Friedman Conference
Federal Reserve Bank Dallas page 6.
www.dallasfed.org/news/research/2003/03ftc_niskanen.pdf"Given that the elasticity c implicit in recent U.S. fiscal conditions is about 0.8 and the average tax rate is about 0.3, the marginal cost of government spending and taxes in the United States may be about $2.75 per additional dollar of tax revenue. One wonders whether there are any government programs for which the marginal value is that high. Given the estimate of the long-term elasticity c from the U.S. time-series data, the marginal cost of government spending and taxes may be as high as $4.50 at the current average tax rate. "