171–180 of 256 posts
The cost is spread amongst all tax payers and costs kept low.
I honestly don’t understand why not every single American is screaming for access to health services that are literally on their front lawn.
I cannot fathom this is any way shape or form.
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Practically all owns today are usurious, since interest is involved. If you look at the old testament and the Quran, this was prohibited for a reason, and we see the effects today very clearly.
Why would anyone lend money without interest?
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It's not necessarily that simple. I would say that for most Americans who are cash poor, they intentionally do not optimize their taxes to break even, but rather to ensure they never end up owing the government money at the end of the year. The rationale for this is pretty simple. Even if you're poor, $50 a month in extra income isn't going to make or break you, but an unexpected bill for $600 in April can really mes…
It is still better to save an extra $50 in your own bank account than let the government pay you 0% interest in it.
Most people end up with some mix of side income and tax breaks that are hard to predict in advance. If you’re wealthy and you’re off by $500, so what. But if you’re poor and you were off by $500, it can be devastating.
So again, I think it’s rational behavior for some whose life is optimized around avoiding cash flow surprises than optimized amount maximizing return on capital.
I need to recheck my W-4. As far as I know, I pick the right things there and still get a stupidly large refund.
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> Withholding is an awful idea designed to favor the government over the taxpayer I don't understand this claim. Why wouldn't be the baseline be to pay tax on taxable events as they happen (ie per paycheck)? This seems completely reasonable to me. I don't even see how it softens the psychological blow: again, the baseline of "every time I get paid, I lose X amount of taxes" seems like a pretty reasonable visceral sig…
Quote from the Treasury: "it... greatly reduced the taxpayer's awareness of the amount of tax being collected, i.e. it reduced the transparency of the tax, which made it easier to raise taxes in the future." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_withholding_in_the_United_... ) Same reason payment plans are offered for cars and iphones. Technically, many people are payed by the hour; should they have to immediately pay…
Sorry, that may have been unclear. I don't doubt the psychological effect is greater when it happens in a lump sum. I'm saying that it's just as easy to say that people overestimate their taxes when they pay in a lump sum and accurately estimate them (at a per-paycheck level): there's nothing about once a year that's special and justifies privileging it.
> Technically, many people are payed by the hour; should they have to immediately pay tax?
No, they're not. Their pay is measured by the hour, but they are _paid_ on different schedules (eg once every two weeks), at which point they're debited for the tax (in that they receive net pay). I don't see how anything else wouldn't be the reverse of having a large refund: ie, an interest-free loan from the government to the taxpayer.
> It also led to a drastically reduced paperwork burden, which was cheaper for the government, businesses, and consumers.
This is belied in the part you elided from the quote you pulled. from the same sentence:
> "This greatly eased the collection of the tax for both the taxpayer and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. However, it also greatly reduced the taxpayer's awareness of the amount of tax being collected, i.e. it reduced the transparency of the tax, which made it easier to raise taxes in the future"
Also, I'm not making the claim that there's no pragmatic argument for annual payments (though I personally disagree). My complaint was that part of your argument rested on treating annual payments as arbitrarily natural and measuring the downsides of withholding from that flawed perspective.
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Yeah there was a great breakdown of this when the representative from Irvine, California grilled CEO Jaimie Dimon, a bank teller who lives in Irvine makes $15 an hour, basically such a person if they have their own apartment will be forced to choose between having food and having a phone. We have kept salaries frozen for so many decades that we have impoverished the majority of working people to a ridiculous level. A…
It’s rich that the representative from Irvine thinks hourly pay is the problem and not the cost of housing in CA. I am in the 96th percentile of earners and there is no way my family could afford to live in Irvine.
Why why why do you put up with this in America?? I live in the uk and health has always been free at point of use. The cost is spread amongst all tax payers and costs kept low. I honestly don’t understand why not every single American is screaming for access to health services that are literally on their front lawn. I cannot fathom this is any way shape or form.
What do you suggest we do?
> I honestly don’t understand why not every single American is screaming for access to health services that are literally on their front lawn.
You think we aren't?
You think it matters?
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> many skip getting things checked until it seems absolutely necessary True, but isn't that the entire point of hdhps, to minimize unnecessary visits? They still provide no additional cost annual physicals, so you'll get the required yearly screening. Additionally, many offices have no cost phone or email advice. I'm personally quite happy with my family HDHP - and it is nice to have additional retirement savings. Bu…
> They still provide no additional cost annual physicals, so you'll get the required yearly screening. Well, until you find out that you can only get the physical for free, and physicals are really not worth much. If you discuss anything at all with your doctor that is outside a routine physical, ask any questions, get any advice, and he codes it when he submits the bill -- it won't be free at all, it'll cost you a c…
As employers switch to High Deductible Health Plans where insurance doesn't kick in until one has spent a deductible of several thousand dollars, many people are delaying health care in general. A doctor's visit that once cost a co-pay of $30 is now frequently a cash price from $130 to $400, plus more for lab work. With higher costs and much of them unknown in advance, many skip getting things checked until it seems…
I paid 400 dollars to have a doctor tell me to neti pot my nose after having sinus infection for 3 months. Might not be rational but fuck everything about this system. Who is pocketing all this goddamn money?
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The answer is obvious: deregulate. Indian surgeons already perform more heart bypasses more often for a tenth the cost with better outcomes. Down with the AMA. Probably the organization with the most blood on its hands in peacetime America.
It is a lack of regulation that got us into this mess. I don’t hate the free market, but the prices in the US are caused by the free market gouging as much as they can out of someone who has no bargaining power