People often promote one of two common fallacies about the proper use of tax dollars. The first is that tax dollars are “public”, therefore they cannot be spent on activities that implicate religious support or other obviously non-consensus activity. The second is that tax dollars are “the public’s money to spend”, so whatever whim a legislator has, if it has majority support, then it is a roughly optimal use of the funds.
To illustrate the first, let us consider the matter of education vouchers. The common argument against allowing vouchers is that they subsidize religious education with the public’s tax dollars. The underlying fallacious assumption is that the affected members of the public do not want their tax dollars to pay for religious education. As a macro that also can be true, but I am considering here the individuals’ desires, in a situation where there are religious and non-religious parents. Consider as an alternative to providing compulsory education through schools, that instead a parent must pay for or provide themselves, the necessary education. In this case, no tax dollars would flow to the public treasury, so some parents would pay for schooling which has some religious component, and some would pay for purely secular education.
Consider further that instead, all the tax dollars are collected into two pools: those paid by the religious parents, and those paid by the secular parents. The “public” that opposes the use of tax dollars for religious education would not be paying for it. Indeed, the religious parents could pay more taxation if they wanted more religious education for their schools, and it would be no problem for the secular parents. Hence, the objection to the use of properly accounted tax dollars for religious education, is really a statement about how much money each group of people (or emoluments, royalties, etc.) are putting into the pot. Indeed, pooled general taxation as such (vs. required subscription) is not even required in the simple case.
To that end, let us consider several related situations:
- When the bulk of public spending comes from mineral rights, tariffs, or other similar sources. If they really are “public funds”, then notionally they would be allocated according to head count, equally among people. In this case, as long as the religious schooling did not cost more, so that disproportionate spending caused subsidy, then this still avoids seculars paying for religious.
- Fixed costs of school systems. Such fixed costs primarily come in the form of facilities, which can be shared amongst different types of education, and hence the aggregate subsidy likely is negligible.
- Areas that have almost 100% or 100% religious education. In this case the subsidy is backward from the usual American, as the secular is drawing more funds. But, the secular children can just skip the religious classes and it’s not a big deal. (other than the social ostracism, but that’s a given in this situation regardless of funding)
- The “backup” or “last resort” schooling, for those children for whom charter or private schools will not service (e.g. due to disruptive behavior, special education, etc.). If the children are disruptive enough to be kicked out of normal school, they shouldn’t be in a normal school setting anyway. Likewise, children on intense IEPs can’t take advantage of the cost savings of mainstreaming. Regardless of the structure or religious/secular, someone has to warehouse and/or educate the kids, if they can be taught; and such education will by necessity be in a smaller, more expensive classroom. This mitigates the concern about what type of education is being subsidized for two reasons: the children already are drawing more than average share of educational resources, and the smaller class size means you have more flexibility to teach them in whatever manner you see fit (vs. the larger classroom where you are teaching to the average student, hence shoving Christ down their throats). Further, as the students clearly are being subsidized, the portion of total educational spending still is coming out of general taxation, paid by both religious and secular. So as long as the children aren’t being forced to get religious education in these settings, it’s not out of line to provide proportionate religious education in any event.
- Progressive or other more complicated tax codes. In this case, the tax dollars paid in are not close enough to evenly split among the number of constituents in the district – they are coming from some arbitrary combination of preferences. There can be several justifications for the general setup of the tax code, but practically, it is because the rich and upper middle class actually can pay for the deficit in required public services, as the middle class or poor don’t have enough money that it economically is effective to tax them for the difference. To take the hardest case, assume that the rich/upper middle class all are secular, and the middle class/poor all are religious. If the religious then ask for subsidy for religious schools, then this winds up being the offending case, as religious education includes more content than secular with the same secular standardized-achievement test or other secular objective endpoint. (There are some weird special cases where teachers may accept lower pay to teach in religious schools, but that is heavily context-dependent and requires an ongoing talent bidding process to validate.) In this situation, as there is an obvious budget disparity that cannot be cleanly separated, the religious underclasses have to accept secular education in the subsidized system.
Hence you can see that treating tax dollars as “public-only” is often a lie, as an individualized solution that achieves the similar endpoints usually can be negotiated. Hence often the use of force to take the tax dollars and require secular education is unnecessary, hence criminal.
On this general topic of the proper use of public funds in reference to individual preferences, there are other two other errors I will mention.
The first is spending tax dollars on individual preferences with no accounting for who received what. Usually what happens is a road goes in, a park or other facility gets built/acquired, or a grant/gift program of some sort is established. Although the need is particular, the justification is “everyone gets something, so it’s fine to allocate it out of general funds”. The problem is, even in a simple system, not everyone gets an individual set-aside. Indeed, many individuals would prefer lower taxes instead of these set-asides or grants. On top of that, you have issues like progressive tax codes which cause further imbalance of funds paid in vs. funds received out. Hence this winds up being backdoor theft. Tax dollars must pay for required common needs in order to have general benefits that you can attribute to all taxpayers.
The other error is the “this has a common benefit that individuals can’t not benefit from, therefore it is OK to pay for it with tax dollars”. Beautification efforts and entertainment/Taj Mahal buildings usually are the offenders, although subway systems and other infrastructure can fall under this.
As for beautification: beauty is in the eye of the beholder (aesthetics), and taxation is functional. Therefore the assertion that whatever cosmetic improvement is made benefits the general public, is incorrect.
With the entertainment buildings like stadiums, convention centers, etc. the argument is “we take a loss on the building but win on tax revenues from visitors, prestige/advertising, and the citizens who do want it do pay for a lot of the cost.” The benefit of prestige/advertising has to be set against higher tax rates, hence that becomes a losing argument. The proposition really is about knock-on benefits from external travel (because taxing your own citizens can be done anyway). I think the fallacy best is expressed with an alternative business model: if the activity is net profitable, then a private investor group should be able to build not just a special taxing district, but a special business district, with the consent of the surrounding neighborhood, where the taxing district pays down the cost with the revenue from the additional visitors. However, there is an even simpler means of running said district than a government special-purpose vehicle: have the investor group buy all the surrounding property, which will increase in value/annual profit if they build their improvement. They’re already on the hook for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build the entertainment facility – why would you cheap out and let someone else make the profits?
Subway systems are some of the worst on the infrastructure side: they almost never pay for themselves. Some of these systems are effectively legacy assets that have existed for decades, so we keep them open if population density clearly justifies. However, even such jurisdictions (e.g. London) build new tunnels. Consider the “common benefit” of taking cars off the roads. The fallacy: subways/light rail are not the only alternatives – not only bus rapid transit, but ridesharing and other mitigations like permitted tags to enter the city. This assumes that the additional commuting space actually is needed and telework is not effective (which is basically a lie in most Western developed cities, because they moved the polluting factories out of the city center). The real proposition of the subway is: we are going to create a massive population, either with no cars, or commuting, that we need to get to work and for whom we need to provide some sort of mobility solution. There is no justification for making a dense commuting hub because the types of specialized facilities that require such a hub (semiconductor manufacturing, refineries/chemicals) beyond historical (e.g. the existing port) do not make sense to locate in the center of a busy city, because either city or the facility pose hazards and operational challenges to each other. In the case of expanding ports, if your port really is that busy, you actually want to build freight rail or dedicated highways to move the product, as well as upgrade the automation to process more containers. Moving more people or commuters in is beside the point. As for creating a massively dense urban center, people can choose how they want to live – and they can pay for their own subway with tickets. The argument is “I have a bunch of poor people who can’t afford full fare.” The point people miss is that it does not make sense to house unemployed/slave wage poor people in a packed city center with such expensive buildings/infrastructure/human costs to sustain. You pay your workers, and you move the disabled to areas where you can get ambulances and social support services in and out. Making the beneficiaries pay avoids mistakenly taking billion dollar public deficits to build infrastructure, for the benefit of the upper middle class and rich who desire or benefit from such concentration, and spreading that burden amongst the poor and middle class. In other words, subways are not a general benefit in these elective cases, therefore you should not use (required) taxation.