Ok, so here it is, inspired by tax season and software as a service.
What would the world look and be like, in your opinion, if instead of a bevy of taxes both hidden and not hidden, there was just one subscription fee for societal participation.
Describe this world as you perceive it
Either I pay the fee, which the government forces me to do anyway, or I don’t. In the latter case, what happens? The military stops defending my house in particular? The FCC doesn’t regulate the radio waves that pass near my head? The FDA stops inspecting the wheat that goes specifically into my cereal bowl?
Presumably, much the same thing that now happens if you don’t pay your taxes.
I’ve always thought we should have a tax lottery. Every dollar you pay in taxes gets you one ticket in the draw. You still wouldn’t likely get anything back, but the possibility of winning big might eliminate some of the whining about taxes.
Hell, some people might even try to pay more in taxes just to increase their chances of winning.
It’s your world, how do you wish the rule to be enforced?
For one thing, we’d lose all ability to use any tax system as a method of encouraging some behaviors and discouraging others. Some people think that would be an advantage, of course; others don’t. But leaving arguments about that issue out of it:
If that one subscription fee works as a head tax, with the same amount required of everybody, it’s massively regressive.
If it’s a head tax: moderately poor people become even poorer, moderately well off people become somewhat less so or stay steady depending on the amount, rich people become richer yet, and really poor people who genuinely can’t come up with the amount – what? go to pauper’s jail as punishment for being poor?
If it’s income based, then everybody still has to fill out their income taxes. And there will still be arguments about what, exactly, ought to count as “income”.
If it’s a head tax but some of the money is used to supply income to the poorest people to mitigate the problems of the head tax, then everybody who might be eligible for the rebate still has to fill out their income information as if it were for income taxes, and the people who don’t think they’re eligible get all the benefits of any paperwork avoidance. Plus which, what happens the first year people are too broke to pay? Does everybody get a year’s grace period, and if so, wouldn’t there be large numbers of people, including those who could afford to pay, who’d continually be a year in arrears?
In addition: if this is supposed to supplant all taxes, federal, state, local, sales, income, excise, corporate: does that mean that whether East Podunk gets to repair the bridge on Johnson’s Farm Road has to be decided at the national level, in competition with the road system in DC, the hospitals in NYCity and those in West Podunk four states over, every school system and sewer system in the country, the police in Miami Beach, tanks for Ukraine, and thousands of other needs? Oh yes, and Social Security and Medicaid, which would no longer have dedicated funds, at least at the pay-in level.
Personally, I think it would be a bigger mess than we’ve got now. Could all of that be sorted out entirely rationally? Maybe. Would it be so sorted out in practice? Hell no.
In my world I would hold someone without food or water until I received satisfactory definitions of “subscription fee” and “societal participation”. (Since it’s my world I can put the period outside of the quotation mark.)
Ok subscription fee defined; some amount of value given in some manner so that an entity may participate in society however that entity and society are defined and by whatever means are considered societal participation.
@Exapno_Mapcase has decided to fast until he comes up with definitions of his own.
Just having one tax doesn’t mean it would save people from paperwork. In countries where the tax laws are written by somebody other than the companies that make money off tax preparation, the government mostly sends you a bill, and then you can correct it, and file more complicated forms if you have to provide additional information.
My fantasy tax would be a single fee, but the people paying could directly decide where there money goes. 50% to education, 10% to defense, and the rest to space exploration? Perfect, just fill in the boxes. Obviously that is completely unworkable in almost any situation. Wealth disparity would be a huge problem, with the rich being allowed to control what happens, unlike our system today where it’s one vote per person, and wealth has no influence on government.
What planet did you say you were from?
Based on current federal tax revenue and population, this annual subscription fee would be around $14,300. A guy working a forty hour a week, minimum wage job makes $15,080 a year. This guy is going to have some difficulty paying his federal tax fee.
On the other hand Jeff Bezos’ average annual income is $468,000,000. No wait…my mistake…$468,000,000 is his average daily income. So I think he’ll have no problem paying his share, which works out to three seconds’ worth of his income.
This Wiki article gives his total net worth as $128 billion (as of Feb 2023). That daily rate works out to an annual income of 170 billion.
Something a bit strange is going on if his net worth is equal to just 9 months of income.
Can they tax that?
It’s been done.
I think my remark went ‘over your head.’ 
Ah. Quite possibly. – it occurs to me that you might mean the head I don’t have.
I was going for a rhetorical point so I didn’t do any deep research. I googled “Who is the richest person in America in 2022?” and Jeff Bezos was the first result. So I googled “How much does Jeff Bezos make a year?” and I got a cite which said:
How much Jeff Bezos earns per day?
The third on the list of Forbes real-time billionaire index, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos’ daily income is $0.468 billion, considering his current year net worth of $171 billion.
So, Jeffery Preston Bezos (that’s Jeff’s full name) earns almost half a billion US dollars daily.
I will readily concede that this guy’s math seems pretty shaky. He seems to be unclear on the difference between how much Bezos has in total and how much he made in 2022. (Most sources seem to report he lost money in 2022.)
But as I said, I was making a rhetorical point. I doesn’t really matter if Jeff Bezos makes a million dollars a year, a billion dollars a year, or a trillion dollars a year. Regardless of the figure, it’s absurd to charge him the same amount of taxes as a guy who makes fifteen thousand dollars a year.