OK, I need for you to think about this. I’ve mentioned this to some of you before and you’ve rolled your eyes. DO NOT ROLL YOUR EYES. Rude and a misplaced sentiment at best.
We need to talk up the idea of a national tax lottery, more or less as follows:
- Every year for a period of ten years, a random 2,000 American citizen taxpayers would win 100 million dollars each. If my math is correct, that adds up to 20 billion bucks a year for a total of 200 billion redistributed almost at random;
- Only persons who had filed and paid a positive tax amount for the preceding three years would be eligible;
- No one in prison with a sentence of over a year eligible;
- No one with a taxed wealth of over 20 million eligible;
- No non-citizens eligible;
- The winnings would not be subject to federal tax;
- The winnings would be delivered in cash to up to five locations of the winner’s choosing;
- The winners’ identities would not be released by the government for one year.
This is not just a fun idea. It is a good and important idea for the health of the country. Tell me why I’m wrong and be prepared to suffer the shame of your more but greatless wrongness.
Hmmm. OK, this might not be among my best ideas.
Uhhhh, this is QE, as long as you put a caveat that the recieptant must be a Federally chartered bank C suiter or a politically connected state bank
Ah, yes, name drop the forefathers as the trump card in any discussion and your ideas will instantly become patriotic. The tax lottery must have been in that long-lost 86th federalist paper!
In order to keep our current budget — which is vehemently defended each year by liberty’s nemesis — we would have to increase taxes to fund the lottery (or just print more money, which is the same as increasing money by devaluing the dollar). So we are giving more power to our taxing overlords.
You might win this lottery, but I don’t like my odds! I understand shuffling the millionaire rolodex, but getting rich should involve adding value to society. Getting rich because you simply exist and are lucky… meh
To get the money I have this idea to choose and eliminate a few thousand unnecessary fed gov jobs. In any case, I didn’t ‘namedrop’ the forefathers, I *evoked* them. And I didn’t do it to be patriotic, I did it because they were wicked smaaaht. Not all of them and not entirely. Central bank — ouch. They had been talking to John Dillinger and he told them, “That’s where the money is printed.”
But I don’t think most of the supper rich added that much value to society. The market is warped and everybody gets lucky or unlucky. We had a famous draft lottery too. Nah, nah — a better reason for opposing a tax lotto is that we really can’t say with any confidence that most newbie-richie-rich would spend the money wisely in a social or political sense. If it were me, it’d be all rum and hookers, but not everyone is as responsible as I am. We might just add fuel to the stupid fire.
“redistribution of wealth” doesn’t exactly scream “liberty bristles”
How about instead: each year we randomly choose and eliminate a few thousand unnecessary fed gov jobs (which tends to be the vast majority of them). That way, we all win
Yes, excellent. I figured someone would bring up the illiberality of redistribution measures. You’re not wrong, or not not exactly and completely wrong, but these are strange times. First let me address the screaming. I feel as though I should be screaming every time I post; it is all I can do to avoid the CapsLock key. But to the substance: Most of our federal taxes go to redistribution programs, and every one of those programs increases and centralizes power in the government, government which has committed “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Much of the money is directed toward NGO’s the missions of which are to directly weaken our constitutional system. Billions of other dollars are pure waste, flowing into unknown hands illegally. Soooo, just as the forefathers concentrated not on a particular aspect of liberty, but on liberty’s nemesis, the program I’m proposing has as its purpose the redistribution of power away from the federal government. The exceptional-fundamental-genius plan of the founders was not to protect against the redistribution of power — it was to protect against the redistribution of power in the direction of its concentration in abusive hands. That’s the key. Our taxing entity has too much power, and one way we can adjust that abusive distribution is to have the taxing entity just give it back. I agree with you we should also eliminate federal jobs. Most of those jobs, in fact, but the monster has developed great resistance to that. A lottery would be popular and relatively easy to sell. The massive creation of new millionaires might create the constituency of effective resistance needed to a shrinking of the federal government happen. Don’t think in terms of money now. Think in terms of relative power later. Plus, I figure I’ll win.