this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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The earned income tax is complete bullshit. Why would people be taxes for earning money through labor? You've already spent your time, and earning money through labor is already one of the least efficient ways of generating wealth.Besides you're still going to have to pay sales tax
The central bank emits money, and gets it back with taxes. Without taxes we'd just have galloping inflation and probably wealth hoarding.
Today we also have wealth hoarding, which could be at least alleviated with taxes, and taxing work more than capital gains is ofc utter bullshit. IMO.
No, the central bank does not get money from taxes. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
The central bank emits money that turns into inflation. On purpose. Because the only thing worse than galloping inflation is no inflation or deflation.
The way to not get galloping inflation is to not print crazy amounts of money.
Taxes are primarily there to fund the state (which has a much, much higher budget than what the central bank emits) and secondarily to discourage undesired behaviour.
Income tax is used because it's super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex. Together with property tax and VAT (or other forms of sales tax) it's the backbone of most tax systems because these taxes are simple to calculate, are simple to collect and are hard to evade. Also, they disproportionally affect lower and middle classes so the rich people in power like them as well.
The real reason is that the people who are wealthy and make their money off of capital gains wanted to use the idea of income tax being easier to avoid being taxed themselves.
It's a bit of both, surely, but it really is much more difficult to move employees, real estate and sales outside of the country than it is to move capital outside of the country.
Because it's the greater way for the government to get money.
I'll give my country example. 2023.
State tax income was 270.000 million euros.
Out of those 120.000 million were labor income tax.
Business tax was 35.000 million
Sales tax were 80.000 million.
The rest were other taxes.
Work is easy to tax, and more fair.
Sale tax is 21% to everyone. Labor tax depends on your income. The more your income the more you pay, so it's proportional.
Removing all labor tax for sale tax would be highly unfair to people with low income.
I'm more on the opposite route. Sale tax should be lower and income tax higher.
...what about capital gains tax?
Taxed from 19% to 21% depending on quantity.
The reality is that not enough people have a significant amount of capital gains. My country only have 30 people with over a billion euro. For contrast USA have 900. I think here only one million people have over one million euros in total net worth.
The truth is that it's not rational to pretend that society get sustained only taxing capital gains, even if they were taxed 100%.
I'm all for augmenting capital tax, mostly because I don't think there should be billionaires at all. But I do not think their disappear would make my taxes significantly lower. At the end of the day they are very few. If we want the current amount government expending most people, workers, will have to keep paying a ton of taxes, even if we were to expropiate and execute all the billionaires.
Yeah, so you completely missed the point. A sales tax is based on consumption rates. People with more money will consume more and pay more in taxes which is appropriate because it's proportional to not only their income but also they're spending power. This brings us to our next point a persons spending power doesn't have anything to do with their earned income, or The labor they provide, or the value they provide to the country overall at least in the United States. If you were born rich and you never worked a day in your life you would never pay an income tax you would pay a nominal 15% capital gains tax on the trust fund that your parents set up for you and then keeping sales taxes low and property taxes low basically just subsidizes you.
So increase capital gain tax. And run a net worth tax.