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Taxes are mostly to control the flow of money and to give a currency legitimacy (if you need dollars to pay taxes, you likely will want to earn in dollars).
Governments that control their own supply of money can print and use money freely.
They don’t use the money from taxes to fund anything, that wouldn’t make sense.
Programs and agencies are funded NOW, while taxes are collected later.
If there is inflation, the state can just raise taxes. If there is no economic activity (deflation), just increase spending.
Orthodox economists, classical liberals, are fucking dumb and live in dreamland.
Case in point, there are countries that collect very little to no taxes. Like Saudi Arabia, formerly Libya, North Korea etc. They still have/had extensive government programs.
Business taxes – including corporate income tax and self-employed income tax at a standard rate of 20% on business profits; VAT-registered businesses also pay VAT at a standard rate of 15%
Withholding taxes (WHT) – payable by non-residents on income made in Saudi Arabia, at a rate of between 5% and 20%
Real estate transaction tax (RETT) – effective from October 2020, this is payable on property transactions at a rate of 5%
White land tax (WLT) – payable by owners of urban vacant land designated for commercial or residential use at an annual rate of 2.5% of market value.
Social security contributions – paid by Saudi employees at the rate of up to 10% of their salary, with the employer also contributing up to 12%
Zakat – a kind of charitable tax that is linked to the Islamic faith and contributes towards those in need, charged at 2.5% on the net worth of all Saudi nationals and businesses.
There are a shit ton of taxes in Saudi Arabia. Because they need it to pay for shit.
Ok I was wrong in one of the examples. It’s indeed very hard to find countries that don’t tax at all, as it’s an important tool to control and maintain currency legitimacy.
But that doesn’t invalidate what I said at all.
Taxes are not used to fund the government. The government literally prints money. They are the ones that do it. They can do it whenever they want. They can also borrow almost infinitely unlike regular people. The government doesn’t need to “earn” money to spend it like people.
They own and control money, the currency as a whole.
Just read on the origins of money (“Debt the first 5000 years” for example) if you want to understand this more. I’m not a professional explainer so I might fuck things up.
But yeah, if a government spends too much but has no revenue (from national companies, taxes etc.) their currency can lose legitimacy. But if a country like the US has their whole currency backed by all countries in the world needing to hold huge reserves of it for international trade, the spending can reach astronomical levels before the currency starts to lose legitimacy.
It’s easier to be replaced by the Yen than to spend too much… Which is why politicians keep raising spending by hundreds of billions every year. But they never need to raise more taxes… Just complaint about the debt when they’re the opposition. Which keeps rising without any negative effect.
Idk man, like I said I’m not a professional explainer. You can read more on this or see some videos. Like it’s not such a fringe topic, I’m not being an edgy contrarian.