There a problem with your importance metric—the importance of malaria funding should be measured not by how much it costs but by how much good it does. $1B of malaria funding is much more important than $1B of , right? If we imagine that all the raised revenue gets used for fighting malaria, then it makes sense, but of course that is not a realistic assumption.
I think that raising tax revenue for the US (and maybe some other countries) is not as important as it seems at first glance due to our flexibility with the Federal Reserve and record low interest rates, allowing us to take out a lot of debt or print money.
But within the sphere of tax policy, I weakly feel that cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion (both tax havens, and domestic stuff like increasing IRS auditing) is the best I/N/T combination, as opposed to conventional tax policy issues like changing tax rates or considering wealth taxes/VATs/etc. It would be nice to look at this more carefully, seeing which reforms seem harder/easier and comparing how much revenue they would raise. But even if this kind of tax reform is not the easiest path for raising revenue, it may still be best due to the secondary benefits for fairness and law-and-order.
There a problem with your importance metric—the importance of malaria funding should be measured not by how much it costs but by how much good it does. $1B of malaria funding is much more important than $1B of , right? If we imagine that all the raised revenue gets used for fighting malaria, then it makes sense, but of course that is not a realistic assumption.
I think that raising tax revenue for the US (and maybe some other countries) is not as important as it seems at first glance due to our flexibility with the Federal Reserve and record low interest rates, allowing us to take out a lot of debt or print money.
But within the sphere of tax policy, I weakly feel that cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion (both tax havens, and domestic stuff like increasing IRS auditing) is the best I/N/T combination, as opposed to conventional tax policy issues like changing tax rates or considering wealth taxes/VATs/etc. It would be nice to look at this more carefully, seeing which reforms seem harder/easier and comparing how much revenue they would raise. But even if this kind of tax reform is not the easiest path for raising revenue, it may still be best due to the secondary benefits for fairness and law-and-order.
Anyway, good post. Thanks for the contribution.