Comment Re: But, how? [Re:Is basic income looking better y (Score 3, Insightful) 85
There are only three ways to fund a government: extracting cash from foreign nations (war / tributes), extorting taxes from citizens (income / tariffs / VAT) and debt engineering (monetary / fiscal policies and platinum coins for some reason)
Modern societies are reluctant to pay the cost of blood and threatened violence to reliably extract money from foreign nations.
Democracies are reluctant to pay the political cost of reminding their citizens they are being extorted for taxes.
So elected governments tend to fall back on the monetary games, which conveniently depends only on credibility and sleight of hands and while its subtle enough has little political cost
Unfortunately by the time being subtle is not enough, the political class may not know how to use any other tool. And if you burn all credibility with shenanigans you lose the legitimacy to any of the three toolsets.