A different way to look at Taxes

(This has been sitting in my to-be-edited file too long. I'm just going to hit post.)

I just got done with taxes a few days ago. I honestly do not mind paying for the government services that I receive. (I do take exception to the percentage of our national wealth that we are spending on war in comparison to other things but that is for different longer blog post.) I really think that we need more government not less. We need more money spent on education, more environmental regulation and management, and more publicly funded science. I'm less convinced about other things such as social services but I generally think of them as a good thing but I need to be convinced on an individual basis.

However, I think that our tax system is perversely constructed. If I were running things I wouldn't tax income, I'd tax consumption. I wouldn't give tax breaks for building/buying houses or having children. In other words, I would tilt the tax system toward consumption of resources and environmental things, not toward things that are ultimately bad for the environment. However, I would still dole out tax breaks. Social service would probably be my biggest tax break. If you provide something that benefits the society and furthers the society's values then society recognizes it with a writeoff. e.g. some of them would be pretty obvious teacher, doctor, foster care provider... That way society could reward people who benefit the common good and tweak the tax break on a yearly basis to modulate demand. Some would be less obvious, like serving in environmental restoration projects. For example a non profit project might be granted X number of social welfare credits and they would be able to grant those out to those who participated in that project. If a lawyer decided to do pro-bono work and defend an indigent defendent they would get social welfare credits. If he decided to come into schools and teach people about how the legal system works, that would be some credits.

I think that I would make tax credits for businesses work a bit differently. A large portion of it would be the:

sum of for each employee (a function based upon employee wages relative to the mean or median + provide healthcare bonus + provide retirement bonus...)

Thus employeers would find that their tax was = tax on resources consumed - epsilon employees f(employee). In other words they would find it beneficial to provide as many good paying jobs as possible and use as few resources as possible.

I think that the big thing is that it would force people to look at things from a different perspective, one where they evaluate things based upon the social good that they are creating. If they are only doing something for themselves, then there is no tax advantage in it. As Jesus said regarding the rich person who blows the trumpet to call attention to his big offering to the church, "He has his reward."