| How high should taxes be? The obvious answer is: as high as they need to be, but it can be hard
to think clearly about this question when you think of taxes as your money that "the government" takes from you. (It's also hard if what's
left over is impossible to live on, but I will discuss this in a later episode of this parable.) When the castaways in the parable first ended up on the island, they basically had a tax rate of 100%, and no one complained! They had to spend all of their time working together to survive. However, by investing some of their time into building useful infrastructure, they reduced their tax rate to about 50%. Each person only had to contribute about half of their day to the essential projects of the group in order to keep them going. Later, when they got lazy and let things fall apart a little, they had to increase their tax rate until everything was working well again. Finally, the tax rate had to shoot way up again after the storm hit. The tax rate is just: how much of our time should we devote to the essential national projects? And the answer depends on the circumstances. It depends on how much work is needed on those projects at any given time. Sometimes, setting taxes too low can result in having to raise them again to repair all the infrastructure that has gotten run down due to neglect, as when the castaways got lazy and let their shelters and vegetable gardens and fishing equipment go to seed. Other times, outside disasters may strike, forcing us to do more work temporarily. Finally, there will also be times when everything is working well, and the rate can be low. One big difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives tend to feel there is a lot of important work that is being neglected right now in this country, and we want to spend the time and energy needed to fix up these areas now, rather than let them get more run down and require even more work to fix in the future. |