Seth wrote:Tero wrote:That's how taxes work, seth. Tax the rich. Our only tool.
No, Tero, that's how thieves work.
Taxes pay for your fair share of what you use by way of government services or infrastructure and only that.
Everything else is theft by the Marxists of the world.
This is by no means an uncommon trope in right of centre politics; the notion of an inherent deficit in
fairness when it comes to taxation. However, while this might be promoted as a common concern or a criticism about monies being gathered and spent on something that does not benefit the well being of the general population and, therefore, merely represents a tool by which government supports and/or enlarges its own scope and reach, when one drills down into individual issues one invariably encounters the base position that it is illegitimate for a government to distribute revenues on something that the individual doesn't (or shouldn't) personally approve of.
Whether it be funding Lesbian theatre groups, trips to the seaside for children in remand centres, or benefits for people you have been told aren't really disabled, a sense of indignation and even OUTRAGE is engendered in and by people who confuse government spending with household expenditure: "If they're spending my taxes on so-called diversity training for liberal yoghurt knitters that's less money to spend on me and my kind."
It's curious to note that this kind of manufactured indignation rarely extends to government expenditure which supports company share prices or the offsetting of a bank's tax liabilities against employee bonuses and executive expenses.