It's an interesting question and something I've spent a fair bit time thinking and studying about. Lets say that you did have this choice, everytime you bought a coffee for example you could make a 10% donation to the local road fund, if people decided to pay then you can be sure they valued the presnce of road more than the extra 10% in their pocket. If they decided to keep the money they obviously didn't want the road that badly.
Coffee's kind of a bad example, because there are alternatives to it. Most people have coffee out of habit and for the caffeine, but they could drink tea or other such drinks that are a substitute just because they won't have to pay the tax on the coffee. In any case, the roads won't get built, and Starbucks would sue you for a discriminatory law. But this actually illustrates that you have to either take it from everybody or not at all. The best parallel to what you said would be sales taxes, which are commonly used to help pay for public projects.
The are two problems with the current taxation system;
1) once the road has been built the taxes don't cease,
2) taxation is levelled indiscriminately.
What I mean by 2 is, the road is a capital good and as such produces a return; it "earns" an income by providing a service to people. The tax system doesn't tax the people that benefit from the road, they tax everybody, this means some people overpay and others underpay. A fairer more equitable tax system would take account of these anomlies and adjust itself accordingly, but ours doesn't. It's like paying 50 cents for milk whether you purchase a pint or a swimming pools worth, and asking others to subsidise your choices if you demand more. In other words it's unfair on a lot of people.
For 1, this is not always the case. Many taxes are set to apply for a specified length of time so that they may automatically come up for review. And if we're talking about roads in particular, then 2 isn't entirely accurate either. A common way to get money for roads is via a toll booth, which is a direct tax in proportion to use, but this isn't always an option outside of road service.
Also, it isn't entirely true to say that roads don't benefit people who don't directly use them. A more efficient, better planned road system means that everybody has less traffic.
Forcing people to do stuff does get stuff done, but it's an inefficient system imo. There are better ways to go about things.
It has its issues, but inefficiency is not among them. Trying to drum up interest for something, asking people to donate for it, creating the infrastructure to allow for those donations, etc. is a lot less efficient than just jumping up the sales tax in order to pay for something.
Yes I agree with this, but I don't think there's a lot that can be done about it. If all CEOs' wages were reduced by 80% tomorrow it would have a negligeable effect on the nation's prosperity. There are bigger fish to fry imo.
Maybe not 80%, but you'd think people wouldn't balk at a 3% increase, which is exactly what the Republicans planted their feet and refused to budge on with the Bush era tax cuts. It's estimated that the extension of his tax cuts will add 3.9 Trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. What exactly could we be using that money for? Starve the beast, anyone?
The best type of regulation is the free market kind; government control is just another form of monopoly. As you're arguing against the monopolistic powers of health insurance companies it seems a little counter-productive to advocate another form of centralised control as a permanent solution.
Well, first off I wasn't suggesting moving to full socialized medical care, I was more suggesting that there need to be regulations which allow the government to prevent overinflation of insurance costs. A public option would have done exactly that, but so many people bought that "public option" was just political doubletalk for "socialized takeover of the American medical system" that it was removed from the healthcare legislation. Honestly, if the Democrats have learned anything from getting DADT repealed, they'll try in the near future to get a public option passed as a standalone bill, where it isn't attached to 1000+ other pages which obfuscate what it really is.
There are some benefits to a socialized system, though. It is extremely sensitive to cost-benefit analysis, so treatments that aren't effective are kicked to the curb. Additionally, it focuses much more on effective preventative care than putting out fires. Our medical system, by contrast, makes a lot of money putting out those fires, and many people skip routine medical examinations or don't seek medical help until their condition is serious. 10 years ago, we spent about twice as much of our GDP on our healthcare system than either Canada or Britain, both of which have socialized medicine. Considering how much the cost has increased as of late, I'm sure you can extrapolate how much that means we spend now.
