The reason we tax the things we tax and in practice the whole political debate about tax policy is simply the intersection of ability to pay by the payer and ability to enforce by the state and that’s why all the imputed rent or taxing home production stuff is idiotic.
Economists like to say tax policy is based on idk efficiency or something but there isn’t really any evidence that’s actually what it’s based on... and also no compelling argument that it ethically *should* be based on this
But if you think it’s somehow “unfair” to tax a worker who gets paid to do something but not to tax someone who does that thing in their own home idk maybe you don’t understand the ethical intuition behind taxes
Subsidizing childcare for workers is nooooot rebalancing the tax wedge against on-market production folks; that is an absolutely crazy way of imagining the baseline from which tax policy is made
That’s like the weird old colonial taxes where they imposed head taxes just fir the sake of forcing societies to reconcile themselves to the cash economy; it’s bonkers and clearly unethical!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
