Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/2099 debt

24-4

the other day I read an article where Tory or right-Libertarian types were really upset about the national debt and were trying to pin it on government programs, but their proposed solution of expanding the private sector made absolutely no sense whatsoever, because if you do that the national debt doesn't get paid either, and it maybe gets paid even worse

and I imagined stupid scenarios where other countries came to collect the national debt and began insisting US corporations had to pay taxes or else they would impose consequences on the United States the way it does on Third-World countries. if they were really smart they would only take the payment of the national debt in taxes, or whole corporations, and refuse every other kind of payment

this scenario would certainly be a mess if it happened. [good thing it's impossible] the United States would revert back into trying to destroy every country that does not protect the rank of the United States but on the bright side, all the other countries would be taking pieces of society right out of the United States for their own use in the global graph struggle as the ultimate consequence of letting the chunk phenomenon persist. the world would come to realize that the inner instability of the United States and inability to get all the chunks to pay for each other or to function at all was a liability in keeping the United States in one piece, and ultimately this irresponsible behavior tends to scatter pieces of countries across the world whether they are workers or corporations

"All-Liberalisms"

world collects US national debt -

Liberal newspapers proclaim that the US national debt has gotten too big and the only solution is to close government programs and grow the private sector center-Liberal parties argue back that this could only work if corporations all agree to pay taxes and pay the national debt. ultimately, the issue ends indecisively and no government programs are closed nor is the national debt paid.

then one day, a bunch of countries show up to collect the national debt. a lot of the debt in the United States is actually sold as bonds, which take money out of the economy and have to pay interest when they return it. this is a major way US debt gets to specific countries. nonetheless, countries try to put together programs to pay back the bonds, but they require payment from the United States

24-4

this just isn't how the national debt works is it

it seems like the way it really works is it is a way to launder capitalism savings bonds conceptually replace taxes. the US government borrows money and then it sells savings bonds to individual investors in the United States and other countries that make the government pay interest. I am not sure where the interest comes from but I know the debt ceiling stops a lot of loans when it maxes out so I suppose it is their money

what is most interesting is "taxes" are now just another commodity that is getting purchased. the people who want to buy taxes and think they have enough money buy them. and then the government creates social programs. sometimes there is another step of borrowing between government departments, but it doesn't matter because sometimes it stops at savings bonds anyway. in a sense each government expense becomes little more than a request for capital

capital simply does not get transformed into taxes and stays capital. nobody can actually vote on where the capital goes by voting on taxes, they would have to genuinely have a vote on how individual corporations use capital to control it

but if the bourgeoisie ever get impatient about savings bonds the government will pay back the first round with a second round of debt and give the second round to somebody else. nobody can actually show up and get outraged at savings bonds. the government will continue its cycle of passing responsibility to a scattered cloud of people flowing around like fog molecules.

"ScheiderTowns"

... it's like people tear large connected economies reasonably capable of transition off into an archipelago of little shard businesses

... before we can get any of them to pay taxes ... the archipelago process destroys population-societies. ...

when tiny shard businesses are separate from each other, they are under a lot of strain to both stay in business and individually generate enough to pay for government programs. they are not physically able to help society even if they really wanted to, as much as they all rush to take on huge responsibilities they can't possibly deliver just to receive the smallest taste of "freedom".

24-4

the IRS is after small businesses! -

my relative, "Bob", fell behind on taxes for about 11 years. every year the IRS sent a nasty letter reminding him that thousands of dollars in taxes were due, and it seemed to pile up every year with only small interruptions. about eight years into the eleven, he got a letter threatening to "seize his property", although nothing actually seemed to come of it. many of the letters were never opened. they were all uncovered at the end of the 11 years, when "Bob" died and left behind one big whirlwind of unfinished service to clients and unfinished tax bills.

why does the IRS send letters demanding thousands of dollars in taxes? taxes are the cost to have a republic. no taxes, no republic. back when there were feudal structures, large-scale nobility demanded taxes from each feudal territory

imagine if whenever the IRS did not get the correct sum of taxes, campaign ads were banned and the IRS seized all campaign donations to fund the government

24-4

people say Cartoon Network used "beware the batman" as a tax deduction

if they don't make money on a show and let it fail, they don't have to pay taxes

25-4

> imagine if whenever the IRS did not get the correct sum of taxes, it seized all campaign donations

this is a great thought experiment, unlikely as it is to happen in real life. the IRS gets very serious, and starts putting out regular ads that democracy costs money. elections themselves keep existing exactly the same as they always did. but whenever a particular state doesn't pay enough taxes, the IRS seizes all its candidates' campaign money to cover taxes. how much would that actually be?

> The IRS projected that the gross tax gap in 2022 was $696 billion, although the agency estimates that $90 billion of that amount will eventually be paid, resulting in a net tax gap of $606 billion. > 9 billion

that is. hardly a drop in the bucket even with another $1 billion on state elections for each state that would only be about 60 billion, which is a tenth of the tax gap I think if this happened it would become permanent, and effectively, campaign ads would be softly banned for the forseeable future. you could only make them with no budget or else you lose your money to the IRS this would be no real problem for progressive parties that seem to primarily advertise on Twitter it seems likely the reactionary parties would get really mad for a bit but if we're talking about federal taxes they can't move to Florida to get away from taxes and lower the deficit people might get super mad at government programs but the funny thing is if the government spends anything at all even without particular programs there will still be taxes. people can't run away from the existence of taxes just by getting all the programs cut. is it just me or is this terrible idea almost beginning to sound good. there have to be problems with it somewhere. it has to be too good to be true. but quite honestly. it seems to me like the IRS might be one of the single most powerful weapons to get people to stop refusing to pay for healthcare. it's the only way you could use Liberalism to get at the root of the problem — morality shaming won't cause people to pay money if they don't have the money, but flat out sending a tax collector to ask them why they aren't making enough money to pay taxes might be one of the only things that would work.

25-4

one possible problem with this came up in the national debt scenario.

taxes are not the only way the United States government funds itself. sometimes it sells savings bonds. so it's quite possible that if the IRS put pressure on the country some group of people would come up with a scheme where the tax gap would be paid by selling savings bonds. the consequences of this... I think the worst-case scenario is that capitalists get to block all loans if the government doesn't adequately generate money. the whole concept of taxes gets reversed, and effectively, businesses no longer have to produce anything for the government, but the government, which never was a productivity device in this sense, has to produce for businesses.

the likely way to make the government produce interest is to charge for services. physically, the capitalist business territory effectively has shares in the government at this point, so it would not be much of a stretch to start running the government like a corporation. the Serializers of the government don't pay mandatory taxes, but they hand it capital, and then they start using their shares to extract money from the rest of the population not for being a citizen but for being connected to them and having interactions with them. money becomes the lever and the battleground of chunk competition. people can vote on what the programs are and who runs them but not on how much they charge. this means one of two things: A) people will try not to use the services B) people have a certain incentive to vote to axe the government just so they can take decision-making power away from the current Serializers and hope and pray some "other" corporation is better. possibility A is more interesting. in the "dark solarpunk" scenario, people try to use anything but the government services. people are effectively split into two competing material civilizations or population-societies, and if the below-government subpopulation does not produce society better than the Serializers, if it does not _live and exist_ better than the Serializers, everyone regresses into the capitalist civilization and they never get power back. the class struggle takes shape through two totally separate subpopulations competing for mutually-exclusive existence as whole self-contained Social-Philosophical-Material Systems, like an Israeli population-society versus a Palestinian population-society or the United States population versus the Chinese population. populational identity and arbitrary cultural beliefs of the movement or group of people become inseparable from the act of molecularized cold war itself.

man. the real-world thing capitalists do of manufacturing markets out of weird ideological beliefs that markets are good is so much more boring as a thought experiment than all the other horrible possibilities. the savings bonds scenario is horrible but it's genuinely interesting

[*] this scrap feels.... complete? I think there is something to be said about the concept of taxes which ought to reference back to this. but I think much of this entry is "over with"

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1999 ScheiderTowns v5.1 scraps/ population-societies, taxes, and "Scheider Towns" [unreleased]

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:: cr.

2024-04-11T03:20:39Z

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v5-1_200X_debt

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200X is the same thing as 2999, or 2099 - an indistinct number range. it was used for a bit in early 5.1 and then phased out.

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v5.1 scraps/ US national debt

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v4.4-5.1 scraps/ a modest proposal for tax collector armageddon