I, uh… think we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t see spending or taxation as a bad thing.

I came from your first post as you being anti-taxation (under any circumstance). While I don’t agree with that position (because I like a society that pools our resources for all of us to benefit), I do understand it. Your statement quoted here confuses me even more.

I mean, peep the @midwest.social, for a hint. And I did specifically say that I wouldn’t recommend any terms to replace “raise” and “revenue” that have a negative connotation, such as “deactivation” or “destruction”.

I took that as you want synonyms for “destruction” that don’t sound so negative. That sounded like whitewashing to me.

I will quibble with this:

The spending of a tax dollar is the beginning, not the end, of the benefit.

The spending is the beginning, yes – but not a tax dollar.

Governments don’t need to tax first, in order to spend second. It’s the opposite. That’s why “raise” and “revenue” are such terrible terms. Because they prime you to think that taxes are how we pay for things.

Those words don’t make me think how we start paying for things, but rather how we sustain paying for them.

We pay for things by just paying for them. The government spends dollars into existence.

To make this a truthful statement, you’ve got to skip 4 or 5 very important steps. Stable governments don’t spend dollars into existence to begin with. That ability is the product of a long set of other actions over decades before a government can do that. “Spending dollars into existance” is NOT Step One, as it appears you’re presenting it here. Its the product of strong national monetary policy, a stable government, and the issuing of governments bonds.

Taxation is just there to incentivize economic activity to chase those new dollars and keep a stable value.

The is a huge oversimplification. You’re handwaving away mountains of effort of government just ensuring that stable value.

If you view taxation as necessary to gather the funds to do something, you can have a bunch of resources just sitting around doing nothing and never be able to utilize them because you can’t gather the funds without destabilizing the economy. But if you can just spend the money into existence, you can go ahead and increase the utilization without taxing first and then adjust taxation as needed from there on out.

I don’t mean to be insulting, but this sounds like a very naive view. Yes, in the short term a stable government and perform deep deficit spending to accomplish important short term goals (national defense from being invaded, disaster relief, etc) and its the right choice irrespective of the consequences of that deficit spending because there is an immanent and existential threat to the nation. However, it is an extremely rare government that can deeply deficit spend without dire short term and long term consequences. “Adjusting taxation as needed” ignores all the realities that increasing taxes anywhere will cause economic reactions. Some of those reactions may be “worth it” but the government has to plan for that to happen and be willing to accept that consequence. Nothing in your post addresses any of that.

And it turns out, this is how money has always worked. Taxation has always been a cleanup step to keep the spending productive, not a prerequisite to enable the spending in the first place. The myth of tax as revenue is relatively new.

HUGE citation needed here. Prior to the use of fiat currency, there were hard limits on the amount of money in circulation. This alone was barrier on spending (and growth). Let me make it clear, the abandonment of the gold standard was good thing.