I became more aware of how much tax I was paying when I became self employed because instead of paying a bit out of each check like a w2 worker I have to pay it in lump sums quarterly.
I run a low overhead medical practice so I don’t have a tax cheat llc, I take the standard deduction every year and as a result my taxes are pretty much the same as they ever were. Even though it’s roughly the same amount (slightly more actually, now that I cut out the overhead of medical systems stealing 30-60% of my labor) there’s something psychological about paying the amount in a lump sum
I think paying taxes is important and I want to do. However I feel conflicted about spending this money because what I feel paying taxes are important for are generally not what my tax dollars fund, and increasingly so. I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment, better public schools, access to healthcare, infrastructure like roads, power lines, sewers, moving away from fossil fuels, better handling of trash and recycling programs, rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders, mental health programs including interim programs like community supports and mobile programs that exist in between outpatient and inpatient, social welfare programs that give people access to housing, food, electricity, etc
But instead my taxes pay for these things increasingly less. About 20% of my taxes go to military and defensive spending and while I do think some amount needs to go to this I think it’s absurd. Most countries spend 3-5% on defensive spending. Even China, the second highest after the US, spends 6%.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors to launder billions from taxpayer and Israel for genocide. I also resent that my tax burden continually increases despite making roughly $60-70k a year while the services around me continually decrease.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors
Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.
In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense
Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc
But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.
Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.
I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment,
Most people say this and I agree. And then the comment under you is complaining about paying property taxes which directly pay for these things you’d like to see funded.
I’d rather pay income tax than property tax. The problem with property taxes is that lots of elderly people in old homes with no plans to sell are getting taxed as if they have million dollar house money. They’re basically getting punished for the gentrification of their neighborhood.
If we collected that money from income taxes and capital gains taxes instead, the results would be more equitable. This would likely increase my own tax burden, but I can afford it a lot better than my elderly neighbors. They can pay when they sell their house, which is when they have the money.
I’m all for tax reform, but people need to understand what taxes pay for what stuff. I’m sure municipalities would like a different way to generate revenue than property taxes as well.
In Canada we like “sin” taxes on bad for you things. The lottery funds schools, liquor taxes fund health care for example.
I know that’s how some places do it now, but why do specific taxes need to pay for specific stuff? Earmarking the funds just makes it harder to allocate them.
In some cases it makes some sense at face value, like having road or fuel taxes pay for road upkeep, but even then it results in having to scale the taxes to meet demand, in possibly untenable ways. Also, you don’t need to drive a car to benefit from roads and related infrastructure, so even the seemingly obvious connections aren’t necessarily fair.
I especially object to using local property taxes to pay for schools, because this just means affluent areas get lots of school funding (in addition to the donations they surely get), while schoold in poor areas get scraps. Which in turn makes it even harder for students to escape poverty.
I think because when a tax is getting implemented the people want to know exactly why they pay it and what it’s for.
Here we have school boards that manage a very large area of many schools. The taxes of many municipalities pool to fund many schools. These tax systems are old and probably very hard to change. I’m sure there are better ways to do things but the political might to change the system isn’t there.
Why? Knowing that my property taxes pay for one set of things and my income tax pays for something else does nothing for me. In the end, all that really matters is how much my net pay is, and whether the government is spending its income reasonably.
In the school example, my area also pools it, I believe statewide. The schools also receive federal money from my income tax. I don’t care, as long as the schools have the funding they need. Which they don’t.
I don’t get to choose what kind of taxes I pay or what they go to (except that dollar to the presidential campaign fund), so how do I really benefit from knowing which goes where? Just pool it all and make a budget! It’s like Americans are addicted to overcomplicating things.
You’re looking at it from the wrong side. Imagine a politician saying, “we’re starting a new tax, 20% of your income”. You ask why, what’s it for and he says “everything!” how keen are you for that?
All taxes were created one at a time and sold to people individually. Politicians said “we need money for x, we need to tax y to pay for it”. Run for office on a platform of eliminating all taxes with your omnibus tax reforms and we’ll see how it goes.
You can say what an increase in funding is meant to finance without earmarking the funds. Other countries do that just fine. In this example, you’d run on lowering property taxes, because campaign on the tax you’re increasing is never a good plan.
I get that there’ll always be some taxes collected at different levels, like some federal, some state level and some municipal, and that does to some extent direct how the funds can be used, but earmarking the funds beyond that just adds complexity and fucks up budgeting. It’s how you end up with stuff like every other thing on the budget borrowing from social security.
The real thing hindering these kinds of reform is that American politics are inherently resistant to change. With a two-party system in near equilibrium there will rarely be any opportunity to change big things, and in practice most big changes in the US happen at the judicial branch as a result. For example, WA doesn’t have income tax due to the WA supreme court declaring it unconstitutional, and changing the constitution is nearly impossible to get the votes for in the current political climate.
I became more aware of how much tax I was paying when I became self employed because instead of paying a bit out of each check like a w2 worker I have to pay it in lump sums quarterly.
I run a low overhead medical practice so I don’t have a tax cheat llc, I take the standard deduction every year and as a result my taxes are pretty much the same as they ever were. Even though it’s roughly the same amount (slightly more actually, now that I cut out the overhead of medical systems stealing 30-60% of my labor) there’s something psychological about paying the amount in a lump sum
I think paying taxes is important and I want to do. However I feel conflicted about spending this money because what I feel paying taxes are important for are generally not what my tax dollars fund, and increasingly so. I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment, better public schools, access to healthcare, infrastructure like roads, power lines, sewers, moving away from fossil fuels, better handling of trash and recycling programs, rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders, mental health programs including interim programs like community supports and mobile programs that exist in between outpatient and inpatient, social welfare programs that give people access to housing, food, electricity, etc
But instead my taxes pay for these things increasingly less. About 20% of my taxes go to military and defensive spending and while I do think some amount needs to go to this I think it’s absurd. Most countries spend 3-5% on defensive spending. Even China, the second highest after the US, spends 6%.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors to launder billions from taxpayer and Israel for genocide. I also resent that my tax burden continually increases despite making roughly $60-70k a year while the services around me continually decrease.
Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.
In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense
Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc
But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.
Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.
So that stuff too
Most people say this and I agree. And then the comment under you is complaining about paying property taxes which directly pay for these things you’d like to see funded.
I’d rather pay income tax than property tax. The problem with property taxes is that lots of elderly people in old homes with no plans to sell are getting taxed as if they have million dollar house money. They’re basically getting punished for the gentrification of their neighborhood.
If we collected that money from income taxes and capital gains taxes instead, the results would be more equitable. This would likely increase my own tax burden, but I can afford it a lot better than my elderly neighbors. They can pay when they sell their house, which is when they have the money.
I’m all for tax reform, but people need to understand what taxes pay for what stuff. I’m sure municipalities would like a different way to generate revenue than property taxes as well.
In Canada we like “sin” taxes on bad for you things. The lottery funds schools, liquor taxes fund health care for example.
It’s the same in the USA at the state and local levels. Most states’ lotteries go to education.
I know that’s how some places do it now, but why do specific taxes need to pay for specific stuff? Earmarking the funds just makes it harder to allocate them.
In some cases it makes some sense at face value, like having road or fuel taxes pay for road upkeep, but even then it results in having to scale the taxes to meet demand, in possibly untenable ways. Also, you don’t need to drive a car to benefit from roads and related infrastructure, so even the seemingly obvious connections aren’t necessarily fair.
I especially object to using local property taxes to pay for schools, because this just means affluent areas get lots of school funding (in addition to the donations they surely get), while schoold in poor areas get scraps. Which in turn makes it even harder for students to escape poverty.
I think because when a tax is getting implemented the people want to know exactly why they pay it and what it’s for.
Here we have school boards that manage a very large area of many schools. The taxes of many municipalities pool to fund many schools. These tax systems are old and probably very hard to change. I’m sure there are better ways to do things but the political might to change the system isn’t there.
Why? Knowing that my property taxes pay for one set of things and my income tax pays for something else does nothing for me. In the end, all that really matters is how much my net pay is, and whether the government is spending its income reasonably.
In the school example, my area also pools it, I believe statewide. The schools also receive federal money from my income tax. I don’t care, as long as the schools have the funding they need. Which they don’t.
I don’t get to choose what kind of taxes I pay or what they go to (except that dollar to the presidential campaign fund), so how do I really benefit from knowing which goes where? Just pool it all and make a budget! It’s like Americans are addicted to overcomplicating things.
You’re looking at it from the wrong side. Imagine a politician saying, “we’re starting a new tax, 20% of your income”. You ask why, what’s it for and he says “everything!” how keen are you for that?
All taxes were created one at a time and sold to people individually. Politicians said “we need money for x, we need to tax y to pay for it”. Run for office on a platform of eliminating all taxes with your omnibus tax reforms and we’ll see how it goes.
You can say what an increase in funding is meant to finance without earmarking the funds. Other countries do that just fine. In this example, you’d run on lowering property taxes, because campaign on the tax you’re increasing is never a good plan.
I get that there’ll always be some taxes collected at different levels, like some federal, some state level and some municipal, and that does to some extent direct how the funds can be used, but earmarking the funds beyond that just adds complexity and fucks up budgeting. It’s how you end up with stuff like every other thing on the budget borrowing from social security.
The real thing hindering these kinds of reform is that American politics are inherently resistant to change. With a two-party system in near equilibrium there will rarely be any opportunity to change big things, and in practice most big changes in the US happen at the judicial branch as a result. For example, WA doesn’t have income tax due to the WA supreme court declaring it unconstitutional, and changing the constitution is nearly impossible to get the votes for in the current political climate.