Comment by danaris
> This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it.
And the money the retail clerk gets paid was already taxed when the customers spent it at the store. No, wait, it was already taxed when they got paid it! No, wait, it was already taxed when the customers of their employers spent it! No, wait——
...This whole idea of "money getting taxed multiple times" being a bad thing is absurd. Of course any given dollar going through the economy is going to get taxed many times. It's not about the dollars; it's about the transactions. And, ultimately, it's about funding the government so it can actually provide services, from sanitation all the way up to the military.
(Note that this is not an attempt to say that "the more taxation, the better"; that's obviously absurd, too. There are different levels of taxation that make sense for different people, different countries, different transactions, and different economic circumstances. There is no one simple magic rule you can follow that will always make things better when it comes to taxation, any more than there is with anything else economic or political.)
You get less of what you disincentivize. Putting artificial friction on every single transaction is not free, and it's fucking obnoxious.
Meanwhile, the government you fund takes that money and uses it to surveil you, and commits crimes across the world in your name. And this giant machine that's supposed to stop the bad guys tells you there's nothing to see here when some big scandal comes up right in front of your face.
Yes, I think money being taxed multiple times is too much.