Taxes aren’t necessary in a socialist system. DPRK has no income tax. It would be the money that would have bought their boss his third lambo, that pays for keeping people off the streets instead.

First of all, define “work”. Lots of people do unpaid labor, like parents raising children, or family members caring for the elderly. These are necessary functions for society, and if people didn’t do that labor for free, we would have to pay people to do it. Not compensating people for doing that labor is effectively taxing their labor at 100%. Childacre allowances, for example, aren’t a subsidy for having children, they’re compensation for the costs of having children, which is literally the only necessary requirement for furthering our species. The fact that these unpaid laborers don’t have employment for money doesn’t mean they aren’t actively adding value. This is basic “we live in a society” stuff.

There are also plenty of people who largely aren’t able or expected to work. Aside from the aforementioned unpaid careworkers, there are children, the elderly, the disabled, students, etc. Those people still need resources/services from society to support them. They aren’t lazy freeloaders, they’re mostly just in a different part of their lifecycle. Children eventually become working adults. We all eventually become old people who need to be able to retire as we become less able (and also people should get to stop working at some point as a matter of principle, but that’s a digression). Students need to study so they can become doctors and teachers and engineers. It’s in everyone’s best interest to support people throughout that lifecycle, for obvious reasons.

Further, even bAsIC eCoNOmiCs tells us that a 0% unemployment rate is not only practically impossible, but also inefficient. It actually makes more economic sense to have at least 4% of the working population unemployed at any given moment so that there’s a pool of labor that can fill gaps as the natural progression I mentioned above occurs. People change jobs, retire, go back to school, have kids, etc., and if everyone always had to have a job just to get enough income to survive, there wouldn’t be anyone to fill positions left vacant by the above. That’s why “full employment” in economics terms is usually pegged at around 4-6%. That means that it would be less efficient, and thus inevitably cost more tax dollars, to try and keep everyone employed instead of paying people a minimum income (plus various social services) even when unemployed.

At any given moment, only about half the population is actually “working” in the sense of being employed in some way, and that’s how it’s always been. You will likely spend only about 2/3 of your life working, and the fact that you’re paying taxes on your income now is just the price you pay for all that unproductive time across the rest of your life, past and future. There is and always will be a universal need for supporting people who “don’t work”. I, personally, think that a bare-minimum of compassion for humanity is more than enough reason for redirecting society’s resources to ensure a dignified existence for everyone, but even a misanthropic sociopath should be able to understand why their precious tax dollars should be spent on social infrastructure.

Feeding and housing people ARE SO MUCH less expensive than policing homeless. Even if one has zero empathy for the poor, the economic arguments make better sense.

Your options for where your tax money goes in general are pretty bad. You can pay to make sure the military intentionally overspends and avoids budget cuts or similar issues. It can go towards police arresting the homeless, a punishment that is either summary execution or forcibly giving them a home with staff and a meal, that is designed to abuse them.

Or you can be OK with that money just giving them a home and food, and not carrying about making sure that a prison guard treats them and the other employees that work there like shit.

This may not completely address the argument that the unemployed are lazy, but I think one has to keep in mind what unemployment benefits are for us workers. It’s an extremely good weapon against our employers. A high unemployment benefit means that we have less to fear when it comes to class struggle. So if anyone argues against unemployed people getting paid, they’re talking about stripping the workers of an important weapon they can use to improve working conditions for themselves in the future.

Flip the argument. Extoll how socialism has near 100% employment and relatively no homelessness, even providing good jobs to the disabled. Wiki will fact check this as true, because it agrees, but says that’s bad

That I value people without empathy about as much as they value people without jobs.

"You know who doesn’t work? Billionaires! At least sick people have a reason to have taxes go to them, they need help, billionaires don’t.

I’d deflect to a different issue, because their minds will be made up about this if they really think feeding people in need is bad: “If the rich didn’t tax dodge thanks to policies that favor them, policies that are usually created with input by the rich directly, or just outright written by them, we wouldn’t even need to talk about this at all because we could find everything both of us want easily.”

I had this conversation recently with a colleague that’s on the right but not really giving it any thoughts. He’s mostly voting for “meritocracy” so this kind of arguments is central to him.

I think it somes back to the idea that taxes are not “your money” to begin with, that you are involved, affected and protected by a network, and taxes is just the way we collectively agreed to keep all of us afloat as a regulated community.

Once agreed on that, the sting of “giving my money to the lazy” is reduced. Furthemore it’s not like a no income life is one of luxury, we as a collective decided that starving should be prevented no matter what, and that’s basically all the system is even trying to achieve.

So you can rest easy, the “lazy” are still suffering.

First, I would say: same, way more money goes in subsidies and pseudolegal tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy than on welfare.

Second, I would try to explain that that’s not actually how taxes work anyway. The government doesn’t gather all the tax money into a big pile, count it all up, and then make a budget to decide how to spend it. Instead, money collected as taxes basically just ceases to exist - it’s deducted from your account and disappears. Separately to this, the government simply creates as much money as they want to fund their budget. (At least, any government with currency sovereignty does - this excludes Eurozone countries and many local or municipal authorities, who actually do have to make a money pile, or else borrow it from somewhere.)

Printing too much money can have inflationary effects - prices increase because there’s more money around to buy things - so taxing away and destroying some money is necessary, but if the newly printed money is spent to develop economic activity then you can actually safely print more than you tax by quite a large margin. Neoliberal economists are incapable of/choose not to understand this because it leads to higher wages, lower unemployment and increased bargaining power for the workers, which could ultimately lead to greater political power. Instead they preach austerity doctrine, telling the lie that governments need to cut services and reduce spending to ‘reduce their deficit’, selling off public goods and services to the private sector so they can extract a profit - at the expense of the nation’s people.

I think I would generally go into more detail with the person on what they mean by “don’t work.” If they don’t care about what happens to disabled people, the elderly, children, then they aren’t worth the energy.

Some people have this idea that people who are taken care of won’t want to work so they need to be pushed into it without a safety net, but I would point out that capitalism forces artificial scarcity of jobs to maintain a competitive environment; creates hostile and unsustainable work environments; foments hyperindividualism and destroys community in order to maintain power, so people more end up depressed, demoralized, and unmotivated to do anything; and it’s not exactly motivating to spend your life working just to make someone richer. Capitalism is already creating conditions where people who can work won’t be working.

So when people say they don’t want their taxes going to people who don’t work:

1. Do they even live under a system where they have a say in where their tax dollars go in the first place? Plenty in the US are pissed about their tax dollars going to fund genocide, but it’s happening anyway. If they lived under a system of working class power, the people would be working to overcome problems that relate to those who can work not working, among other things.

2. Do they understand that it’s not a variable you pull out of reality and check yes or no on and move on with your life? Its presence or the lack of it is connected to other mechanisms. It’s never just “your taxes go to people who don’t work or they do.” It’s never just “people don’t want to work.” Those are surface level things in a whole pervasive political system that goes into every aspect of life.

I would tell them that their claim means that they would confiscate all the public services, property ownership rights, inheritance rights, and other services that the British diaspora gained their their Indigenous child slaves in Residential fake schools that continued after 1998 and the stolen inheritance from Indigenous children in the fake cultural assimilation projects. Contrary to the belief of the British emigrants, the work that the British emigrants done contributes little to their actual success; the Indigenous people, African Americans, and other people of colors had bear almost all the burden for the success of the Western European diaspora.

I would say that investing into people that are on the bottom is a much healthier for society in the long term then simply ignoring them and expect them to deal with the odds stacked against them on their own. The reason that socialist countries often punch above their weight in science and many areas is because everyone is included and given a chance.

What do you tell people who say that they don’t want their taxes going for people who don’t work?

I say to those people: “eat shit”