I wish my taxes were higher. (No, really.)

Well, it’s election time again. Two people appear on the TV, and each denounces the other as a lying, backstabbing hypocrite who’ll destroy this country. The voters are presented with a ballot paper that has neither of their names on it, but that’s okay - we all arbitrarily picked a party when we were teenagers anyway, so we just vote for whoever has familiar letters next to his or her name. The votes are counted, and half of us are disappointed, but only momentarily - soon it becomes apparent that the winning candidate has no intention of doing any of the things he or she promised to do, and the country goes back to business as usual.

This time around (as with every previous election since the beginnings of democracy), much of the debate has revolved around taxes. The question most voters seem to be asking is this: which candidate would make a more expensive Prime Minister?

But it doesn’t sound selfish as long as you mention your kids.

As a teenager, I loved having opinions - the more ridiculous, the better. (“There’s no such thing as the Great Pyramid of Giza,” I remember insisting to a perplexed listener. “Matthew Reilly made it up.”) But I really struggled to have any kind of opinion about taxes - mostly because I didn’t have any money. I ran some calculations, discovered that six percent of an annual salary of zero dollars was zero dollars, and decided that tax law wasn’t worth worrying about until I had something worth taxing in my bank account.

After The Lab was published, I had a decent income, but I still had little passion for the topic. The way I saw it, either the government would tax me and then use the money to give me stuff (like doctors and teachers) or they wouldn’t tax me, and I’d get to keep the money, until I was forced to spend it on stuff (like doctors and teachers). Either way, I end up with the same amount of money and the same amount of stuff. Why, I wondered, were people making such a big deal out of this?

I soon discovered the answer: with lower taxes comes increased choice. If it’s still your money, you can choose your hospital and choose your school - plus, you don’t have to pay for anything you’re not using. How could that possibly be a bad thing?

But there’s an ugly side to it. The difference between a corporation and a government is that a government actually cares about its citizens, not what’s in their wallets. When you pay taxes, you get all the money back in the form of transport, healthcare, policing, education, environmental protection and so on. If you pay companies for all these services instead, you only get some of the money back - the rest is filling a CEO’s bathtub on his yacht which is cruising around the swimming pool of his bigger yacht, while he idly muses on how little he cares about you.

Am I exaggerating? Only slightly.

Recently I went overseas to see how other countries worked. I visited France, England, New Zealand, the USA, Italy, Russia, Finland, and Sweden. (I also spent ten hours in Beijing airport, but I don’t think that really counts as visiting China, since I spent most of it asleep on the floor.) All very different countries, with a variety of histories (Russia’s past is particularly fascinating) and wildly differing approaches to taxation.

The United States of America, for example, has a significantly lower tax rate than Australia. The maximum is only 35% and you have to be making $370K per year to reach it. This means very little government interference in the lives of the citizenry - people are free to choose and pay for their own benefits.

The first thing that struck me when I was over there was the class barrier. I was staying in Santa Monica, where roughly half the people seemed to be rollerblading bikini-clad botox-shot models with designer sunglasses, and the other half were homeless people rummaging through garbage bins, all of whom looked like extras from The Road.

Pictured: the land of the free.

Later I found out that there are 48,000 homeless people in the Los Angeles region on any given night.

This makes sense, I guess. Lower taxes means less money for the government. Less money for the government means less affordable housing, education, healthcare. Less of those things means that the poor people - and their children - are only going to get poorer, because it’s hard to get a decent job when you’re homeless, uneducated, and sick. This has left an ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the broke.

It’s worth noting that 49% of the homeless people in the USA are African-American, compared to only 11% of the general population. Their grandparents were descriminated against and forced into crappy jobs (or no jobs), and today, they’re still feeling the effects. The government can’t step in and stop the cycle, because they don’t have any money, because their taxes are so low.

Things couldn’t be more different in Sweden. When I arrived there, I couldn’t find any homeless people, or beggars, or buskers, or people who run after passers-by and yell at them, trying to force them to buy junk. (This was very common in Italy.) I felt very safe while I was there, and according to the statistics, I was right to feel that way - Sweden has among the fewest burglaries, muggings, pick-pocketings and car break-ins of all the countries in Europe.

There’s no Wikipedia article on homelessness in Sweden - which is already a good sign. But with a little digging, I’ve discovered that the rate is less than 0.2%. That means there are almost three times as many homeless people just in LA as there are in the entirety of the Swedish Kingdom.

The tax rate, on the other hand, is among the highest in the world: 48.3%.

Based on all this, I think I like high taxes. I think I’d prefer to have only $50 but live in a country where the government helps me out when I get sick and the police come when I call them, rather than have $100 but get beaten up, mugged, and then have to pay a doctor to treat my injuries.

The trouble is, in this election, both parties are promising to keep taxes low. So who the hell do I vote for?



MITIFOTIT:
Most Interesting Thing I Found On The Internet Today

Since we’re on politics (well, I am, you could be talking about anything at all. I can’t hear you - it’s the internet) it seems appropriate to share this old series of humourous bovine political explanations.

FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.