Alright citizen. You're really ******* me off. "Forcing" me to read otherwise hidden posts by quoting such 'tard-laden deplorable BS as the one below
Oh. Sorry. Then you're
really gonna hate me for this
:
Snipped from post #17 above:
It is generally recognized that society/government does have some proper power to encourage/reward desirable conduct. Whether that is tax breaks for buying a home, but not for buying a car or vacation, tax breaks for installing solar, or for investing in retirement accounts, or even making charitable contributions, government routinely provides encouragement for certain conduct deemed beneficial to society.
Something occurs to me about Utbagpiper's position on tax breaks.
For one thing, if government is giving tax breaks to some, its over-taxing somebody. If taxation is being done at a proper level one day, how can government afford to receive less the next day after instituting a tax break? Who is paying to make up the shortfall? If there is no shortfall, taxes must have been too high in the first place.
Alternatively, lets say government made up the shortfall by raising taxes on the category of people government deemed didn't need encouragement for something. That hardly sounds fair. For example, why should a single person pay more than a person who is married? What if marriage doesn't fit in the young lady's immediate game plan to finish college and get solidly started on a career before marrying? Should she really pay more during her unmarried college and career start years?
What about millions renters who don't yet have down payment to buy a home? Why should they pay more than homeowners?
So, how can government legitimately possess a power to "encourage" some at the expense of others who were themselves doing nothing wrong? Even if one circumscribes his concept of equality to "equality under the law", this is hardly equal.
It seems to me it only takes a superficial inspection of the concept of tax breaks to see those points. But, those are just kinda academic, because the actuality is far, far worse. The federal government is not taxing anybody's personal income at the proper rate (all of Ut's examples are personal income tax breaks). What do I mean by that? In this context I mean the fedgov is not only broke, its trillions in debt. The government is taxing nobody at a rate that covers its expenditures.
As far back as the (Grace?) commission under Reagan, it was determined our federal personal taxes are eaten up by interest on the national debt. Meaning, your personal income taxes don't go to defense, roads, etc. They go to paying interest on the national debt. This is one of the nasty little hidden evils of the fedgov. Since it can borrow to pay for its massive spending, it doesn't have to tax directly to pay for all of it. It only has to tax enough to pay the interest. "Whoopee! We can pander to all these special interests because we only have to be careful to tax enough to pay the interest!"
If the fedgov taxed enough to cover all the spending, there would be a revolution tomorrow morning. But we've reached a point where the fedgov can't tax enough to pay it all off. Depending on the source, the total debt and obligations of the fedgov is somewhere around $50T. Some say a little less. Most I've seen say in the low 50's. Its more than the economic output of the whole planet, which is to say that if the fedgov taxed every human being on the whole planet for a year at a tax rate of 100%, the fedgov still couldn't pay it off.
So, any tax breaks are feeding into fedgov pandering by shifting the lost taxes to the national debt, adding to the day of reckoning when the principal has to be paid, or the economic destruction from a default.