I can think of a hypoothetical person who has a 99.9% chance of living without the tax, and a 99.8% with it. And I can also think of there being more than 1000 such hypothetical people.
“Can afford to live without it but not with it” implies going all the way down to 0% chance. You don’t need to go down to an 0% chance for there statistically to be deaths.
But how does that work? What mechanism actually accounts for that difference? Is this hypothetical single person we could have individually exempted from taxes just barely unable to afford enough food, for example? I don’t yet buy the argument that any taxes I’m aware of impose enough of a financial burden on anyone to pose an existential risk, even a small one (Like a .1% difference in their survival odds). This is not entirely a random chance, since levels of taxation are generally calibrated to income, presumably at least partially for the purpose of specifically not endangering anyone’s ability to survive.
Also, while I realize that your entire premise here is that we’re counting the benefits and the harms separately, doing so isn’t particularly helpful in demonstrating that a normal tax burden is comparable to a random chance of being killed, since the whole point of taxation is that the collective benefits are cheaper when bought in bulk than if they had to be approximated on an individual level. While you may be in the camp of people who claim that citizenship in (insert specific state, or even states in general) is not a net benefit to a given individual’s viability, saying “any benefits don’t count” and then saying “it’s plausible that this tax burden is a minor existential risk to any given individual given that” is not particularly convincing.
There are all sorts of random possibilities that could reduce someone’s life expectancy by a tiny amount but which statistically over large numbers of people would result in more than one extra death. Imagine that someone has to work one extra hour per month and there’s a tiny chance of dying associated with it, or that they delay a visit to the doctor by one week, etc. Or all the other mechanisms which cause poorer people to have lower life expectancies (I highly doubt you can’t think of any), which mean that someone who gets marginally poorer by a tiny amount would on the average not live as long.
I can think of a hypoothetical person who has a 99.9% chance of living without the tax, and a 99.8% with it. And I can also think of there being more than 1000 such hypothetical people.
“Can afford to live without it but not with it” implies going all the way down to 0% chance. You don’t need to go down to an 0% chance for there statistically to be deaths.
But how does that work? What mechanism actually accounts for that difference? Is this hypothetical single person we could have individually exempted from taxes just barely unable to afford enough food, for example? I don’t yet buy the argument that any taxes I’m aware of impose enough of a financial burden on anyone to pose an existential risk, even a small one (Like a .1% difference in their survival odds). This is not entirely a random chance, since levels of taxation are generally calibrated to income, presumably at least partially for the purpose of specifically not endangering anyone’s ability to survive.
Also, while I realize that your entire premise here is that we’re counting the benefits and the harms separately, doing so isn’t particularly helpful in demonstrating that a normal tax burden is comparable to a random chance of being killed, since the whole point of taxation is that the collective benefits are cheaper when bought in bulk than if they had to be approximated on an individual level. While you may be in the camp of people who claim that citizenship in (insert specific state, or even states in general) is not a net benefit to a given individual’s viability, saying “any benefits don’t count” and then saying “it’s plausible that this tax burden is a minor existential risk to any given individual given that” is not particularly convincing.
There are all sorts of random possibilities that could reduce someone’s life expectancy by a tiny amount but which statistically over large numbers of people would result in more than one extra death. Imagine that someone has to work one extra hour per month and there’s a tiny chance of dying associated with it, or that they delay a visit to the doctor by one week, etc. Or all the other mechanisms which cause poorer people to have lower life expectancies (I highly doubt you can’t think of any), which mean that someone who gets marginally poorer by a tiny amount would on the average not live as long.