Because you want to make people angry and upset at least once a year at the government? Because you want to remind people that taxes are something the government takes, instead of letting them think of taxes as money they never earned to begin with.
I love paying my taxes, but if you think taxes are bad (and lots of people do), then the current U.S. system makes total sense.
I'm sort of with you on this. I am proud to know, for example, that my taxes help pay for healthcare for everyone and schools and roads and so on. I like to believe I'll pay in more than I'll get out and that's brilliant.
However. Come bonus time I really struggle with the bit where they say "we're going to give you £x" and then I actually get a bit over half that in the bank. Somehow I internalise the number x and it feels like the tax has been 'taken' in a way I never would for my monthly salary.
It's an interesting if purely psychological difference in my response to taxation.
If you aren't relying on the bonus for other things it's a good option. It means the bonus sort of 'disappears' psychologically, but then if you have a mortgage it probably just gets swallowed up by that anyway.
I get the argument, but whether or not I /want/ to pay taxes, I still have to, so why make it inconvenient? The NZ government finds plenty of other ways to make me angry and upset anyway.
That's not saying taxes should be onerous or deliberately painful -- any more than paying your bank's monthly fees should be onerous or painful. But none of those should be invisible, either. Transactions that are never consciously reviewed are never scrutinized for value. That's no long-term good to either participant in the transaction.
Your fear -- that by removing the hassle of tax preparation, people will dwell in blissful ignorance of their tax burden and the government will jack up tax rates -- is not borne out by my experiences in countries where return-free tax filing is the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ...
Being a dick to someone for seeing what's wrong with the taxes here is awfully small of you.
How unabashedly self-centered! It's adorable.
Don't like it? Don't eat.
I should clarify that I didn't immigrate to California, but was an immigrant to elsewhere. I apologize for the confusion.
It would guess it's a pretty common thread among people who grew up unused to a properly functioning government.
Hint: zero.
There's no need for that, and it occludes rather than clarifies what little point you have.
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.
But you love it.
[0] - https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spendi...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jan/03/iraq-b...
Why not keep the military and solve our problems without it? We need it to be safe now, and until we've already solved our problems, we'll still need it.
Obviously it doesn't always work well and it definitely causes problems, doesn't mean we should get rid of or even reduce it.
Having them used as they are now and deployments in the recent past, not so much.
My point is that these smaller conflicts (albeit mostly misguided) are useful to guide and reform strategy, tactics and spending.
True, but just winning a war or conflict is not an ideal outcome. Overwhelming advantage not only prevents conflict from occurring, it also assures that casualties are low in even low intensity / regional conflicts.
Its called "chain of numbness". Chasing doesn't murder innocent Iraq children; he is far from it but by aiding financially the army that does murder, are his hands truly clean?
UK tax payer here, so the specifics are different, but I have no problem paying my taxes. We have decent free health care, a capable and I think 'right sized' armed forces for our needs, competent policing and security services and my children get free education. If any of those things were not true I wouldn't necessarily want my taxes to be reduced, I'd want the problems with those services to be fixed.
I had assumed the defense budget was larger, it was a nice way of displaying the information.
The UK armed forces do seem a bit top-heavy and our record when it comes to procurement is, by most accounts, appalling.
Based on anecdotal evidence, I think that people paying more than 30% rarely ever "love" paying taxes. Below that, it seems to feel much more ok (I'm also below 30% and - while I'm not enthusiastic about paying taxes - it feels like a fair deal).
I think free higher education is one thing that really help sell higher taxes to high income earners. Free(ish) healthcare is awesome, but you get the feeling that it mostly benefits poorer and older people. Free higher education is comparatively cheap, but it makes our lives simpler and stress free.
Thus, Greece is an example of why we need to remember to keep our politicians at check.
First of all, it means supporting a robust social system, that have provided treatment for my family member's cancer for free. Something that would likely have resulted in bankruptcy in the US, prior to ACA.
Secondly, being in the high end of the tax rate, means i have a high income as well - and it seems only fair that i pay more in taxes than people who make very little to begin with. Society has to function, and let's make the broadest shoulders bear the largest burden.
Southern Sweden seems to have a "last night" problem pretty much every night except when Trump spoke about it.
(Swedish crime rate is still low, at least in homicides it's much lower than the U.S., but Sweden is unlike most Western countries in that the murder rate has stopped going down and has turned upwards, and the politicians sem to be in denial. The police are laying down unsolved murder investigations simply because there are so many newer cases.)
I'm not trying to rag on being American. But I've got close ties with the U.S. so often I compare what a life event would have been like, had I been a typical U.S. family of my economic class.
How would you like paying somebody else's taxes as well?