I saw a comment, deep in a long thread at Daily Kos, whose topic had varied a bit from the original post:

Daily Kos: Is Palin also a tax cheat?. I don’t hate taxes … anymore than I hate paying for my food or housing. Taxes pay for services, and they are a reasonable way to provide an economy of scale we could not otherwise afford.

Would I rather get everything for free? Sure.

I’d also like to have $100,000,000 in the bank, be the starting catcher for the Mets and starting quarterback for the Giants while playing goalie for our World Cup soccer team and winning a gold medal in curling at the Olympics.

The whole “hate taxes” is a right wing meme that helps them demonize the government, and we shouldn’t buy into it.

Frankly, if you make $65K a year and pay $20K in taxes (property, sales, income, excise, gasoline, etc.) you are getting a pretty good deal just on police, roads and schools. It costs $20K to send a kid to private school, and imagine what it would cost if you had to pay for private security instead of police forces and paving/plowing roads?

People pay $75 a week to have their lawns mowed, a couple hundred a year to have their driveways plowed, and a couple thousand for a security system that only calls the cops they already pay for through taxes!

Add in market regulation (lol), health inspection, national parks, state parks, the military, OSHA standards, child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, energy price caps, insurance regulation, courts, trademark and patents, etc. and $20K is a pretty damned good deal you could never get on an open market.

Could we do better with our money? Hell yes. And we should do better. That should be one of the things progressives push hard – cost-effective, reasonable services for the American people. We need to spend less on military, less on handouts to corporations, etc., etc., etc.

So do I hate taxes? Not at all. Do I hate wasteful spending? Yes I do.

I replied:

Some taxes should be hated; others should be used more heavily. WHAT we tax makes a big difference; when we tax the wrong things, we get undesirable effects. In general, taxing wages does not produce desirable effects. Taxing sales does not produce good effects; it raises prices and reduces demand.

But there is a tax base we should use a lot more than we do: land value.

All those things that nathanrudy lays out ultimately raise the value of the land on which our homes and businesses sit. (Those that don’t may not be worth doing!) They make our towns better places to live, make labor more effective and productive.

Why on earth should that value – land value – accumulate in private or corporate pockets? It is created by all of us – landowners and tenants alike, employees and employers alike, capitalists and borrowers alike. Why should some of us pocket it, and all of us pay it to their benefit?

The alternative is to treat the economic value of land as our common treasure, our common asset, the rightful tax base. Tax land value heavily – virtually all of the current annual rental value of the unimproved land (that is, the land under the Empire State Building, ignoring the building itself). To do that would provide an awesome, steady, stabilizing flow of income to meet our common needs, efficiently collectable, unevadable, not causing any negative behavior on the part of any players in the markets. The selling price of choice land would come down to where people who intended to use it could do so without mortgaging themselves to pay the seller. Instead, they would pick up responsibility for paying the land rent to the community, and have the exclusive right to that land for as long as they did so. And they would not be faced with other taxes, which burden the economy and the individual and the entrepreneur.

You might check out http://www.wealthandwant.com/, http://www.answersanswers.com/ and http://lvtfan.typepad.com/ for more about these ideas. And for theory, see http://www.progressandpoverty.org/

And none of us would be tax cheats, because our taxes would be simple and transparent and logical and JUST!

And rereading the comment, I’d now add a few more observations.

I suspect that most of those who make at least $65,000 a year are living in blue counties and likely, if they are landholders, getting a pretty good deal, particularly if you consider just what they are paying in local and state taxes. As the blogpost says, sending a child to private school costs more than most people pay in taxes.

Those whose time is well-paid find it worthwhile to pay someone else to mow their lawn and plow their driveway; both are best done with specialized equipment, and it is well worth paying someone who specializes and has invested capital in appropriate labor-saving equipment. Paying someone else to do it also relieves one of maintaining one’s own equipment.

But I would guess that most of the people who pay for such services, instead of spending their own leisure time doing them, likely live in blue counties, and that in red counties, only the highest-income people pay others for such services.

In densely populated areas, the city or town provides trash pickup, and this is far more efficient, more cost-effective and less congesting than having three or six or ten or twenty private trash pickup companies competing for business and driving down the same streets, picking up from their individual customers.

And there are other things the public sector may be able to do far more effectively and efficiently than the private sector, and we ought to be exploring them. But at the same time, we ought to be paying attention to what the appropriate revenue source is for the value that public provision of such services creates. That is, whether we should be financing those services by taxing wages, or taxing sales, or taxing car rentals, or taxing hotel rooms, or taxing train tickets, or taxing parking garages, or taxing tobacco or alcohol, or whether the appropriate thing to tax to finance a particular service is the land value that the provision of those services creates.

What else might the local public sector do? Perhaps provide city water and other utilities. In my town, the public water system is owned by an Australian bank. The electric company is owned by a large corporation. Provide more public transportation (buses which run every 2 hours do not build ridership). Provide more parking at the railroad station and highway exits.

What else might the state public sector do? Start planning and implementing regional public transportation, particularly rail.

How do we finance these projects? By tapping the land value they create. Every worthwhile infrastructure project or service will create more land value than the cost of the project. We need only measure it and collect it. And every town in America already has an assessor. We need only to untie their hands, put their assessments online for all to see, and require high quality and frequent reassessment of land and (I suppose) buildings. We need not set up any further systems.