It’s always talked about in the media as if everyone cares, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a normal person complain.
I was glad that when I started earning a lot more money, I was being taxed more on that higher portion of the earnings. In theory, this means that I am supporting more good things. I am disenfranchised, however, with the fact that clearly large corporations and the mega rich are not paying their fair share, and that often my tax pounds are being spent in direct opposition of my very existence (anti trans policy, reversal of climate policy, etc).
I care about taxes, a lot, but I don’t care about being taxed a lot, as long as the heavy taxes I face are being used in a good way. If a small dip to my quality of life or excess earnings means that overall the quality of life in the country gets better, I’m super happy to see it.
The last 2 months I have cared a lot. I typically overpay my tax on purpose so the IRS gets an interest free loan and I get to save some money. I aim to change that soon so I just pay what I owe, and possibly don’t get a refund in April. I don’t want to give the regime a single penny more than I owe, and frankly if my state seceded and I didn’t have to give them a dime, it would be preferred.
I think taxes are great, but the rich really need to pull their own weight. The new taxes just fuck over the poor/middle class
As for me, I would rather pay lower taxes and have everyone else pay higher taxes. I vote for higher taxes every time.
We have a saying in my country: there’s no point in complaining because nobody listens. I mean we are all paying so what’s the point of moaning about it
I’m fine paying what I pay, but I reserve the right to question the quality of services they pay for.
And no. A person who pays millions dollars of tax does not have a louder voice than I do. We are all the same tax payers who pay proportionally to our earnings.
Give me back the public infrastructure I need and the billionaires hate.
Property taxes bug me a lot. The tax has gone up over 10% each of the past 3 years. It’s adding a lot to my mortgage.
Texas sucks. Everyone talks about how much it has a low cost of living and minimal taxes because there is not a state income tax, then the homeowners insurance rates go up or get cancelled and you can count on property taxes going up 10% annually. We bought our house in 2016 and the amount has gone up 10% every year since, not including the other bond issues which increase the tax rate on top of the existing rate.
I pay quite a bit in Denmark, but used to live in the US.
I pay more taxes now (not THAT much more but definitely more). However I see what I get for my taxes here: healthcare, bicycle lanes, cheap and very good trains/metro/ferries/buses everywhere, etc., and sooo much support for people. It makes me proud to pay taxes here, even though of course I always want more in my pocket and I want more for my money.
In the US I hated the taxes because I paid more than rich people (as they pay nearly none) and I didn’t feel like i got a lot from them.
No problem with taxes as a concept, but I hate how the US uses tax money
healthcare, bicycle lanes, cheap and very good trains/metro/ferries/buses everywhere
Danish healthcare is cheaper than US healthcare, and bicycles/public transit are also cheaper than the car centric US transportation infrastructure. If the US adopted socialized healthcare and sane transit, we’d pay less taxes not more.
I agree, if the US also used their tax dollars as intelligently as the Danish government does as well.
Seems like a pipe dream, but I hope at least parts of the US become more modern in those ways in my lifetime
I pay a lot in taxes because I earn a lot. I earn a lot because I work hard and I was lucky (had the right opportunities, enjoyed work that is well compensated by capitalism, etc). I don’t care paying high taxes
I’m right there with you. My luck came a bit later in life, so I had 10 working years of income tax actually paid close to 0% as I made little and had huge student loan debt from an attempt to get a degree.
I finished the degree and 10 yrs into a well compensated career and I’ll gladly pay thousands to the government. The wealthy people that complain about paying their share have zero perspective. They’re basically spoiled brats.
I’ve also lived in a state with lower taxes, and now one with higher taxes. You get what you pay for. I hear people everywhere complain about the roads where they live. Not everyone has had to replace whole wheels due to the stuff that some places are calling roads. Again, zero perspective if you don’t get out and see the world at least a little.
I care anytime some rich prick pays less than me.
The vast majority of tax in most countries is paid by those with higher incomes. In the US the top 1% of earners pay more than 40% of the tax collected and almost all the tax (97%) is paid by the upper half of earners.
In the UK the numbers are a little different, but tell the same story (top 1% pays around 30%, top 10% pays around 60% of all tax collected).
So while I know you mean relatively and not absolutely it’s still worth spending at least one minute to consider how much of the tax burden is actually shouldered by the wealthy.
I come from a Scandinavian country and I’m ALL in on redistribution, free education, free healthcare etc. But let’s not have politics ignore the facts.
The top 1% here in the US absolutely don’t pay their fair share. In theory, they pay 40%, but there are so many loopholes that they often don’t pay any at all.
Depends on the tax. Progressive income tax? I don’t care so much. Flatter taxes like sales, property, gas, etc, I care about more because it affects the people at the bottom disproportionately. We only need a progressive income tax AND accountability at the top end for people to pay in. Tired of billionaires getting off free with loop holes.
I only cared when I was poor and living paycheck to paycheck.
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.
So that stuff too
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.
It’s the same in the USA at the state and local levels. Most states’ lotteries go to education.
If you get within earshot of a Republican, chances are you’ll hear complaints about “damn taxes” within five minutes. So to a certain set of people, definitely everyone they talk to is constantly complaining about taxes.
When I was starting out and making little money, the taxes I paid were definitely cutting into my ability to live. I think instead of “standard deductions” we should have real minimum incomes. If you are under the minimum income for your location, you don’t pay taxes.
Now that I am at the end of my career, I think it’s stupid that my taxes are not higher. If I could have given young me some of the money I am keeping now, I would have had a much better life overall. I obviously can’t do that now, but I can give someone else the same breathing room.
If you are under the minimum income for your location, you don’t pay taxes.
Then what if you start earning more, suddenly have to pay taxes and end up getting the same or even less than before?
That is not how taxes work. If you earn the minumum income or less, you pay no taxes. If you are above the minimum, you pay taxes on the amount that surpasses the minimum only, so there is no way of getting less if you earn more.
I am perpetually shocked at how many people don’t understand marginal tax rates, and I truly think ignorance of them is used to confuse people about how wages work.
Then to add on top of that people believing it’s illegal to discuss your wages with other employees. Very little opportunity to be corrected.
I’m downvoting myself for my idiotic early-in-the-morning comment. I do know that. The exemption is 12k in Germany.
I care more about where they are spent. My local government is spending it far better than my federal government. If it was half my income and was spent in ways that lower the cost of living and improve quality of life, then I’d have no problem with that.
If I get a tax cut, I think, cool, at least I choose where this money goes, because I actually do give some to non-profits that benefit society. Tax amounts are not something which determines how I vote, I gloss over it in the news, it’s just incidental that the anti-worker parties want to raise my taxes and spend them in worse ways.
