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Whose money is it?

Whose money is it?

  • It's my money.

    Votes: 3 13.0%

  • It's the government's money. It no longer belongs to me as an individual.

    Votes: 13 56.5%

  • It's both. Please explain.

    Votes: 7 30.4%
  • Total voters
    23
Once they take it, it no longer belongs to me. Just like the government itself which no longer belongs to me.
 
Nilly said:
It's not used to pay salaries, fund stuff etc. The govt can pay for that stuff even if it were to collect no taxes. Why? The same reason that the government can run on a deficit. It can print it's own money. The govt can press a keystroke on the computer and make an entry on a balance sheet.

Ultimately, fiat currency is an IOU that the govt issues. The $5 is a promise issued by the govt that you can redeem this piece of paper for a certain value of goods. When you pay taxes, the govt is holding it's own IOU.

Imagine you wrote an IOU to someone for $5 and then later they gave you back that IOU. How much is your own IOU written in your own handwriting worth to you? Nothing. You can write as many as you like. It's only worth something when it's a liability that someone else holds. When you hold it, the IOU isn't money any more. It's been removed from your IOU economy. LIkewise, when the govt gets your tax money it gets its own IOU's back. It gets removed from the economy.

When a country issues it's own currency, there is no need for tax revenue to pay for expenditures. There isn't a balance sheet with tax on one side and expenditure on the other side. That is very different from a membership club (an example used earlier in the thread) or even a state govt. The govt destroys money when it taxes and creates money when it spends but there is no dependency between one and the other.
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The problem with this practical (and a little utopian) theory is that it demands that each individual economic system in each individual country be isolated. A government can make shells its currency. But the next country laughs at your shells, which means you have no money in that country. You go from rich to poor the moment you cross a border. A global economy demands that currency have value, which means that it isn't and cannot be as simple as merely printing off paper. What you suggest is practical on a small village or tribal level (where true communism is best fitted).

And, of course, capitalism demands that currency have value.
 
I feel like it's my money and the government's. I pay it, and they spend it. Technically, it is mine until I give it to them, but once they have it, they still have to kind of listen to how we want it spent. For the most part. There will always be someone wanting to spend tax dollars on things we don't agree with, but as long as it doesn't get crazy, most of us are OK. I just hate to know that my tax dollars are being spent figuring out which pizzerias have curb appeal, or why monkeys fling their poop.
 
radcen said:
Why do we pay taxes if we don't need to?
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4 reasons taken from two papers of Beardsley Ruml, chairman of the Fed Reserve in the 1940's - (“Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete” in 1946, and “Tax Policies for Prosperity” in 1964)

(1) as an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;
(2) to express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;
(3) to express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups; and
(4) to isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security.
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So the primary reason is to curb inflation. If the govt spends (creates money) without taxing (destroying money) the value of the dollar declines. We get rapid inflation. What that essentially means, is that taxes give value to money. The fact that US taxes require US dollars is why US dollars are worth anything. So taxes drive money.

The other reasons are basically public policy expressions. i.e. they impose a cost on something that imposes a cost on society so that people think twice about doing it. The point of them, however, is not to raise revenue. Rather they influence behaviour.
 
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We agreed, via the social contract, to give the money to the government so that they can do with it what legally must be done to keep society functional. We have a say, via voting, in what our representatives will do with the money. If they start doing things we don't like, it's our fault for putting them in power to begin with.
 
washunut said:
I sort of look at tax money the way I look at the bill at a restaurant after I had a meal. Before the meal it was my money, after dinner it belongs to the restaurant.

Not that I would have spent the money the same way but alas the people voted to represent me and us did.
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But you could have bought gold with it. You are trading a promise to pay for a physical asset. Now you get to lug it around and protect it from theft.
 
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