261–270 of 454 posts
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You... love paying taxes?
Yes. I love paying taxes. Not because I like having less money in my bank account, but because I understand what paying taxes represents.
edit: OK, I understand the sentiment of being happy to contribute to society, but no-one assumes a perfect equation of their taxes to the appropriate and desired government spending thereof.
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The United States has a complicated tax code because it attempts to make things more "fair" for some people. Some of these are things people like, such as deductions for people with children, paying mortage, etc. Some are more dubious.
Why is it fair to give a deduction for mortgage? Buying a home instead of renting is just choosing to invest in real estate instead of anything else you might invest in. Why artificially subsidize one extremely illiquid and volatile type of investment?
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Why should I have to pay $100 to file my taxes?
A counter viewpoint - maybe the system has to be complicated to provide all the various incentives that voters want taxes to do, and to patch all the loopholes that would otherwise be open. Maybe such a system is too complicated for a lay person to understand so they delegate the understanding to private enterprises which can compete to provide the cheapest or easiest interface to the complicated system. If it wasn't…
Tax filing in US is a huge waste of people's time. I wonder if anyone ever computed the amount of people-hours spent on this malarky, and how much productive output it could generate if used for something else.
I live in New Zealand. I don't have to file taxes if my income is a standard wage my tax payments are automatic. My employer deducts them from my wage and they are sent to the IRD (Our government tax dept). My student loan and super payments are also automatic. If there is anything wrong then at the end of the tax year I can file to correct things. I also get donations rebates, this is a one page form that lists all…
Yep, same for Australia - taxes are withheld automatically from your pay and then at the end of the year, you put and extra income and your deductions into the free web app that the tax office provides. I don't think I've ever spent more than an hour filing my return.
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Yes. I love paying taxes. Not because I like having less money in my bank account, but because I understand what paying taxes represents.
Yeah, a couple of wars for one thing, but not fixing dams, that's for sure.
Hint: zero.
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One could argue that by subsidizing home ownership you redistribute profit from people that rent out housing to those that would have been renting that housing.
Yes, and by the same logic, subsidizing buying Apple shares redistributes profit from people that make iPhones to people that buy them. Why don't we do that instead?
But the answer, is that people who buy and rent out property are generally better off than those renting, so redistributing income between them decreases income inequality.
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The UK has a similarly simple tax system as New Zealand. Taxes are taken out of pay every month, and that's it. Every individual gets assigned a tax code, and that tax code defines how much is taken from your pay. That tax code takes in to account how many kids you have etc. etc. The UK tends to approach tax deductions in a different way, preferring to subsidise stuff up front instead, so you never have to remember t…
Do you get any kind of deduction for giving to non-profits/charities? I give about 12-15% of my gross income to non-profits/charities every year and get a generous tax deduction for doing so. The other thing that tends to be complicated with my taxes is selling stocks. How does the UK handle things like that?
The finanical might takes away so much from the commons and also pushes back adoption of good Open Source software. We constantly under-estimate the damage done by these mega-corps.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2015/08/12/former-sap... [2] http://www.iafrikan.com/2017/02/21/sap-south-africas-managin...
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I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter. So my proposal is: 1. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual don…
So questions to your proposal: 1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about those that regularly act in opposition to corporate interests, such as unions, environment groups, consumer groups? Your point 2 seems to imply they would be included, but why are you specific here as to the prohibition? Or do you propose to treat different assoc…
The more invisible taxes are to the individual person, the less they think about that money (and the higher taxes can go without them complaining too much).
Rent feels expensive because every month you write a check for rent. However, for many people, taxes are a much bigger expense than rent. But taxes don't feel as painful, because people don't write a check every month for taxes. Taxes are just invisibly withdrawn from your paycheck.
The easier and more invisible it is to pay taxes, the more you forget about how much money that really is. If you believe in constrained government, there's a good case to be made that we should make tax payments more visible, not less.