I am not what you’d call team orange. I’m not team red or blue for that matter either.
But I have to admit, the potential for 0 income tax or 0 capital gains tax on crypto is pretty exciting. It feels like a bunch of chains being taken off.
The main reason I haven’t been trading more and the main reason I haven’t taken big profits is that I don’t want to deal with tax issues so I’ve been waiting til I can do business in a country that doesn’t tax crypto or until the rules change to become simpler.
Without all the threat of being targeted for not reporting such complicated things properly (an absurd thing to think about, “pay us money, we don’t know how much, you figure it out and if you are lying we will destroy you”), I imagine myself being able to live much more comfortably.
I don’t know if it’s truly feasible, I can’t really imagine the world we are heading into. Governments waste an absurd amount of money, but taking it all away is definitely going to make things extremely unpredictable.
As much as one side wants to claim it’s all waste and not the governments place to solve everything, the other believes that taxation is a necessary evil and doesn’t concern themselves much with how efficiently the money is spent.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the sweet spot is in the middle, and that the waste IS absurd but that some of this money is spent on very important things which will have dramatic effects if taken away, and which the private sector may neglect.
I wish more care could be taken by this DOGE but I also know how strong the web of corruption must be and that nothing but a bulldozer is likely to work.
I’m also under no illusion that this side is free of corruption and self interests. I don’t trust anyone I don’t know personally. I believe humans are fundamentally good when encouraged to be good but I don’t know what motivates a person, or what rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs they are on when no one is looking.
All of these people with power think they know best and I don’t see any humble enough to make a true effort to empathize with different points of view.
I don’t trust anyone who claims to have all the answers, whether I know them or not, and no matter how much I agree with them. Things are always more complex than most people who claim to have answers are willing to admit.
I think ending taxation overnight would probably be a disaster and tariffs could also lead to disaster, but are these actually the necessary evils we need?
I don’t know. I hope so.
All I know is I would love to not concern myself with taxes anymore and I do think we should have a plan to make that a reality within the next 3-5 years. If government can justify taxes, at the very least they should make it of no concern to regular people.
Here are some ideas I think should be completely non-controversial. I’ll try to make them a little more moderate than I may believe is idea because I want to present some ideas which are hard to argue with.
1 Make all primary residences completely tax free
Owning a house for living and owning a house for investing and renting are not the same thing. While I empathize with people trying to preserve our or grow their wealth, I can’t see the justification for treating someone’s first and fiftieth houses the same. Every single person should be allowed one complete tax free dwelling.
This feels like it should be unanimously agreed upon, no?
Personally, I think it’s fair to create quite fair to create relatively high taxes once someone becomes a landlord, although not so high that they aren’t able to make any profit at all, but you want to prevent people with money from driving the price of houses so high that regular people can’t afford them. That’s not part of the case I’m making though today though.
0 taxes on a first house, at least if that house is meant to fit a family of the size that lives in it.
2 Automate all taxation
People should not be wasting hours upon hours to figure out how much money they owe the government. I agree that taxation is theft for people who don’t opt in to the system but let’s say we have a choice and I have opted in to this system (as a foreigner, in a sense I have, because I could have moved elsewhere, though the choices aren’t as great as I believe they should be).
How much human energy is wasted on making things tax compliant? We should be implementing as much automated taxation as possible. Allow us to present a case if we think it’s unfair, but don’t make us do all this work.
I don’t think the government should have access to all our transactions, but if for simplicity sake we want to create a special more transparent account for a business and opt in to it, the bank should be able to figure out all taxes for us and provide us with a statement without any work done by us.
At the very most a taxes should take 15 minutes to fill out and pay.
Stock trading platforms and Crypto exchanges should use automated systems to figure out exactly how much we owe in taxes and give us a statement. An automated document that we don’t need to research or fill out anything, just bam, hand it in and that’s your taxes, finished.
Even worse than having to pay taxes is the message you are sending when you force people to figure out themselves how much you owe them, then threaten them if they get it wrong.
Of course no taxes is better though, so let’s go with that 😊
3 Put all government spending (and voting) on a public ledger
Individual’s deserve privacy. Governments do not, unless it’s for the rare cases when secrets are needed to provide protection to the people, but any other secrecy by government is unacceptable and destructive.
Once we know what our money is really being spent on (not only the worst anecdotes, but the best as well) and can see the details of that and analyze them freely, I think a lot of the arguments will kind of fizzle out. 90% of political arguments occur because one side looks at the best cases and the other side looks at the worst cases. This is half due to the fact that so much information is suppressed.
Fewer people would be arguing with support for people who struggle if we could see how that money actually gets used, and fewer people would allow government to spend so much if they knew it was going to research on how fast shrimp can run.
4 Government spending under scrutiny
Spending should always be under scrutiny, unconditionally. That is everyone’s money and we are not always going to agree how things will be spent, but I think everyone should be on the side of a serious regular government audit.
In fact that’s why I believe a lot of anti-Trumpers have gotten quiet. It’s not just that they feel defeated, it’s that whether you like the guy or not, he seems to be pushing harder for an audit of government than anyone else has in recent memory, and even if you hate everything else about him, that’s kind of awesome and necessary.
I think this guy is reckless and Extremely biased in some ways and I think he has the potential to mess a lot of things up, but this is a true draining of the swamp. Whether he builds another swamp or throws the baby out with the bath water is a completely different discussion worth having, but at least we are seeing a real attempt at draining it.
You can argue that he isn’t doing it right, but your alternative should have a similar kind of audit.
I think these conversations will become a lot easier once everyone gets a clearer picture of what’s going on under the surface. I HOPE that’s what DOGE does and that it doesn’t just become some backdoor for which these people can consolidate more power for their own faction, which I think is a real danger people on the right should consider. If you had a problem with corruption and the media being unfair to one side, you should have a problem with it on the other side as well.
I am not arguing for taxes in any sense whatsoever. I’m just trying to present a case for simplification and reduction that almost anyone can get behind and emphasize just how important and awesome the DOGE is or should be, at least in theory if not in practice.
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