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.
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No , my problem is just about where it got spent
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.
I absolutely did care when I was a single mom just barely getting by, and the state and federal self-employment taxes took such huge bites out of my income. Often, I couldn’t pay them and still eat and pay rent, so I racked up interest charges and penalties.
The self-employment tax system in the USA is royally fucked for people who can hardly support themselves even without it.
Yes. But I don’t complain about it. I do complain about wealthier people and businesses don’t pay taxes like I do.
Yes, I hate giving white supremacists money
A little, but not too much.
Flat taxes annoy me more than proportional taxes.
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.
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 pay roughly 30% of my gross income in th US. The only tangible benefit I get from it is the ability to drive on free roads on my way to work to earn more taxable income. I only wish my money didn’t go to subsidize the rich and make bombs to blow kids up on the other side of the planet.
You get other benefits though. Like the few social safety nets we actually have, public school funding, social security (unless it runs out/gets cut), fire departments, regulatory agencies that keep your food, water, and drugs safe. Etc. It costs a lot of money to have a society. Even if you don’t directly benefit from them, they still make society less shit.
That said, it’d cost a lot less if we didn’t spend so much of it murdering children.
I’m not saying other benefits aren’t there, it’s just that we know a lot of regulatory agencies are being severely cut so it’s gonna be less apparent soon enough. I’m in one of the higher tax brackets so aside from unemployment insurance, a lot of safety nets that require means testing are essentially inaccessible to me as well. Frankly it’s a miracle American society is still functioning even with so many tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
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.
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’m more or less forced to, how I wish I could pay it just like another bill rather than some complicated guess-and-file game.
I also want the government to give me an itemized list, to a reasonable extent, of where my taxes are going. As a thought exercise, I added “taxation theft” to my yearly budget, which I currently calculate as over a third of my taxes. That’s my best estimate of the taxes I’m paying to bomb innocent civilians halfway across the globe, among other uses I would not approve of.
I wish I lived in a country that takes better care of its taxpayers so I wouldn’t have to care about the tax I pay.
I care more about how little rich people pay more than I care about how much I pay. I also care about my tax dollars being wasted.
DOGE could actually be a good thing if it were actually looking through the functions of government to eliminate redundancies, waste, and leakage.
But nope, it’s run by a man child who uses his idea of economics (which is informed by right-wing memes) to eliminate government programs that actually help people and the economy.
It’s worse than that, it’s a malicious dismantling of government agencies who could stand in the way of capitalists making our lives worse to become richer than anyone has any right to be. It’s not stupidity, it’s a game plan. This is always what the right meant by small government, small so rich have no objectors with power.
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.
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.
No (US). Those who loudly complain are generally conservatives who can’t understand how marginal tax rates and brackets work.
In Britain we have a pressure group that’s inexplicably on TV every other week pedalling this lie and the one that corporation tax hurts businesses. (Corporation tax is paid on net profits, so businesses only pay if they can afford it).
What’s funny is they’re called the “taxpayers alliance” yet their narrative suggests none of them actually have any experience of paying tax.