this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
156 points (98.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
36716 readers
480 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The central bank emits money, and gets it back with taxes. Without taxes we'd just have galloping inflation and probably wealth hoarding.
Today we also have wealth hoarding, which could be at least alleviated with taxes, and taxing work more than capital gains is ofc utter bullshit. IMO.
No, the central bank does not get money from taxes. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
The central bank emits money that turns into inflation. On purpose. Because the only thing worse than galloping inflation is no inflation or deflation.
The way to not get galloping inflation is to not print crazy amounts of money.
Taxes are primarily there to fund the state (which has a much, much higher budget than what the central bank emits) and secondarily to discourage undesired behaviour.
Income tax is used because it's super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex. Together with property tax and VAT (or other forms of sales tax) it's the backbone of most tax systems because these taxes are simple to calculate, are simple to collect and are hard to evade. Also, they disproportionally affect lower and middle classes so the rich people in power like them as well.
The real reason is that the people who are wealthy and make their money off of capital gains wanted to use the idea of income tax being easier to avoid being taxed themselves.