Comments Elsewhere

gc on net tax recipients: “3 + 4 [gov’t employees and contractors] are getting paid to do a job by the government. This is very different than receiving an entitlement or a government service that they have not paid taxes for.”

gc, what portion of the federal and state bureaucracy do you earnestly believe performs a useful service for which people should be willing to pay them? If they created a Federal Department of Mud-Pies and employed indigent people making mud-pies all day for $20/hr, would you be willing to say anything like the following?

“They are receiving money from the government because they have paid the government/taxpayer in labor rather than in capital (i.e. taxes).”

If the “services” people are being paid for are useless, then I do not see how they are different in any relevant sense from straight-up welfare recipients—except insofar as the welfare recipients are more honest and more poorly paid. If the “services” are being paid at exorbitantly high rates because of political pull or government restriction of competition (as is often the case in government contracts), the surplus extracted is also different in no relevant sense from a welfare check, except again that it is more dishonest.

“Unless you believe the government should not fund any services, we can junk these two categories.”

Unless you believe that the government should fund every existing service at the level that it currently funds it, we cannot. Pretending that the expanse of useless government programs and services isn’t relevant to the size of government spending is an absolutely ludicrous move.

“Category 4 in particular usually doesn’t receive all their revenue from the government.”

Do you need to receive all your revenue from the government to be a net tax recipient? Why?

“5 have paid taxes their whole lives. Yes, they are net drains w.r.t. SS, and yes, I support privatizing SS, but they have not been net tax recipients their whole lives.”

So? You didn’t ask who has been a net tax recipient their whole lives. You asked who is a net tax recipient now. Social Security is far and away the largest single

“6 is laughable. The super rich are net tax recipients?? Ever look at the fraction of income taxes paid by the top 5% recently? It’s more than 50% of the nation’s total take.”

Come on, gc, you’re smarter than this. The amount that they pay out in income tax—let alone the percentage of aggregate income taxe receipts they pay, is irrelevant. What’s relevant is whether they receive more than they pay, or pay more than they receive. There are plenty of super-rich people who pay more than they receive in taxes. But there are also plenty who receive much more than they pay. This varies, in part, by the industries from which they make their money: the corporate welfare budget is over $65,000,000,000.00 / year in direct subsidies and costs taxpayers somewhere on the order of $300,000,000,0