> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less

Who is "we"? We're talking about governments in general ("good" vs "bad" ones), and I have no idea what jurisdiction you are referring to.

In any case, I didn't say the tap is dry. I said if you keep raising taxes it will eventually run dry. Or to put it another way, taxes are not an unlimited resource that you can keep increasing as much as you'd like. At some point you'll hit a ceiling where raising taxes any further doesn't produce additional tax revenue.

For example, as you raise income tax rates, people have less incentive to advance their careers (e.g. by chasing promotions or improving their skills), and people have more incentive to leave the jurisdiction and go somewhere with lower taxes. Up to a point, the increase in tax rates produces a net extra revenue for the government. Above a certain point, the number of people who stop paying taxes (e.g. by leaving or by working less) outweighs the gains from those who continue to pay. This is why you'll rarely see any government with excessively high top-bracket tax rates (e.g. 60 - 100%), because it results in tax losses.

> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less.

Assuming "we" means the United States, this isn't really true. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, not just since the 1980s, but since the end of World War II [1].

The long-term average since 1945 is 16.85%, the average in the 1970s (i.e. the decade before the 80s) was 16.76%, and the average in the 2020s is 16.96%.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few.

A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.

Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care".

None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position.

Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what".

This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?

> Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less.

In the US at least, that’s the perception because the tax cuts get a lot more publicity than the increases; everyone know that Reagan passed what was, to that time, the biggest (at least in aggregate nominal terms) tax cut in US history, fewer know that he followed it with the biggest increase.

But what has actually happened is a series of tax burden shifts (often, downward from the wealthiest, though some have been the other way or largely orthogonal to wealth.)

sure, but does government prevent wealth inequality, or maybe the very cause of it?

(research hint: inflation, and that millennia old quote/insight: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government...)

Sure. But the original commenter's point that whether a government is "good" or "bad" is subjective because it's dependent on people's views. Other commenters objected to that and appear to see it as objective: a government is either clearly good or clearly bad, and there's no debate to be had.

The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.

I disagree strongly with you on this, but nonetheless I think you've proven the point that the original comment was making i.e. that what constitutes a "good" or a "bad" government is subject to people's views.

In my view, a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad". In your view, a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad". We can't both be right.

Nonsense. The Earth used to be a boiling lump of magma at once point before it cooled, but guess what -- humans can't live on liquid rock. Warmest or coolest is irrelevant over the lifetime of the Earth. What matters is "modern humans".

Global warming is indeed real. Effective change doesn't have to cost a dime. An example is forcing people to buy electric cars at some point. The government spends nothing, people just buy new cars when their old cars expire, now people are driving new cars. Solved.

(you may notice that incentives are gone in most countries now)

And if the weirdos would stop trying to crush every tiny part of carbon emissions, dams provide an immense amount of cheap, clean power once built. We can even make concrete using low-emission methods. Regardless, dams are far better than coal or gas (yes they are random anti-concrete weirdos), so moving on a path to 'better' is laudable and helpful.

(Yes, anti-concrete weirdos are either useful idiots or secret lobbyists. Why? Well, my city puts more concrete into new basements in a single year, than go into a dam that lasts 50 years. Yet I only hear people blather on about dams, which would save immense pollution from coal, the worst polluter it would replace. Also, I've now out-conspiracied the conspiracy guy I'm replying to.)

Power plants expire, whether gas, coal, etc, and instead of revamp you slowly build new, and expire the old.

None of this has to cost. There is no cabal to enact global warming related change.

Requiring people to watch a 1hr+ video to understand your argument is a big red flag.

Thoroughly debunked here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/fake-graphs-and... And here: https://science.feedback.org/review/review-climate-the-movie...

That film is full of misleading nonsense. Like, charts that have been altered to apparently suit a narrative.