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Who counts as "productive"? In the Bill and Shelley thread people are using the word to mean anything from "blameless" to "civilizationally load-bearing." Having a definition for "productive" is important to enable people who disagree to converse, otherwise everyone's talking past each other. The best candidate I've seen is "reducing the per-unit cost of a good or service." On this definition Bill and Shelley are obviously not currently productive, since they just spend money and therefore bid up prices of things. The guy who invented the GMO rice is obviously extremely productive, since he made rice way cheaper for millions of people. But what if Bill and Shelley grow one carrot this year, and eat it instead of buying one at the store. They have, in some small way, reduced the per-unit cost of carrots, but this wouldn't be enough for us to call them productive. There's some ratio of how-much-you-reduced-prices to how-much-you-bid-them-up that most people seem to have in mind when they call someone productive in a strictly economic sense. We don't have to quibble over what that ratio is, but it seems to get hard when you consider someone working as a small cog in the Apple machine, or the Toyota machine. Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice. What definition are you using? How do you tell who is productive?
This is one of those things you need to be really smart to think up something beyond the obvious. If over the course of your life you pay more in taxes than you receive in direct or indirect, yes including multiple layers of being a downstream beneficiary from infrastructure spending or whatever, then you are from at least a public perspective productive. There are some edge cases, intangibles and arguments on the margin but this basically covers it for 95% of people.
I think centering this on taxes (though understandable in this context because we are talking about government subsidies) misses a big part of what productivity is about: value provided to others who utilize your outputs. You could run a business that makes a great product that serves millions of people and just squeaks by breaking even, paying no taxes. That is still highly productive.
This is why, even if the "Amazon pays no taxes" meme were true, this would not make them a leech: they provide so much value to millions (billions?) of consumers.
I think you are overthinking this to try and be general enough to be inclusive of worlds very unlike our own. Yes, in some kind of libertarian utopia with no taxes this all breaks down. And there could be as many as a dozen people in the US who are miscategorized because of your objections here. But it's just not true that amazon doesn't pay taxes, it's just not true that you can run a company, big or small, without spending a significant amount on your own taxes be they salary or capital gains even if we don't credit you with payroll or other corporate taxes, even granting that there are still consumption taxes.
Yes, I agree, above and beyond the more simple analysis some people provide even more value just through their voluntary transactions. But point to someone who is significant on that scale and you will be pointing at someone who is also a net lifetime tax contributor. I only insist on this simple analysis because it undercuts a lot of usually unproductive heehawing about how actually in some theoretical universe the people obviously taking more than they give are really, if you squint, providing a benefit by not being even more value destroying.
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