In the mind of the farmer:
* $150,000 tractor: something that has value (not easy to calculate, but a $150k tractor has a value above zero, even if not brand new) and utility.
* $30,000 to the IRS: money that I will never see again. Literally thrown away money.
Option number 1 is very tempting.
Averseness to government is taxation is so engrained in some country it is almost genetic...and it leads to utterly bad thinking by individuals.
Just because something is worth doing does not mean you can throw money at it with no regard to efficiency.
If you're a strict old-school limited govt jeffersonian type, as many farmers are, fighting income taxes and avoiding paying into federally mandated systems is your civic duty..
not saying I agree with either side - but pointing out that notions of 'civic duty' are not so cut-and-dried
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-is-defen...
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentag...
Their thinking with regards to taxes is that it's spent on one of the following:
- Welfare, which is supposedly rampant with fraud to the point that most people who are on welfare don't "need" it
- Unspecified government waste
Not that these don't exist- it's just that it's the majority of government spending, according to them.
If taxes are cut, they claim welfare will get cut, forcing people to find work, and that government will somehow cut their other wasteful spending while still managing to fund the necessities.
I live in suburban NJ, so it's a bit easier for me to see where my taxes go- police, fire, public transit, a handful of schools. But in rural America, where 911 response times can be around 30 minutes, there's no train to get to a nearby city, and there's only two schools in your town? It looks like that money vanished.
Now if they sell the tractor they have to pay taxes on the full sale price as profit since it was previously worth zero.
They have an hour meter for a reason. This is really what people use to tell if it is new.
Politicians focus on bigger voting blocks, while rural communities (in their mind) pay for those promises.
But in the USA, just as coastal areas subsidize inland areas, typically urban areas within a state subsidize the rural areas. Definitely true of California counties, and I'd be very surprised if this wasn't true of any particular state.
If you believe in wealth distribution, then richer coastal or urban areas should help out their brethren in the rural areas and spread the money around. It's when those rural brethren then attack the better off coastal / urban folks as stealing their money that things become problematic.
And then complain about being the neglected or down-trodden ones.
NY-SAFE is a good recent example of the city doing one thing despite the objection (as opposed to apathy) of everywhere else.
As far as what I prefer: I have no issue subsidizing rural areas, within reason. I support everyone having access to basic infrastructure, healthcare, and education, regardless of where they live. Beyond that, there's no particular reason for government to provide incentives to live in one or the other; let the market sort that out.
While not on the same level as the US, Canada still provides significant farm subsidies, which comes from.. tax revenue!
The reality is that they may not know of the giant pothole on County Road 18 or the rampant littering in certain areas. It may not always work, but informing the local government of issues might get you what you want. After all, you are the constituent that gets those people into office. Let them help you.
many farmers dont.
also: these are not distributed evenly (see also agribusiness)
Additionally some debatably large portion of tax money is wasted or spent on things you completely disagree with, no matter what your political perspective.
Only off-the-grid homesteaders can make any credible claim to having no connection to society at large, but if they get sick, they better be honest with themselves and just die at home instead of going to get healthcare from a system they elected not to contribute to.
You go really far down the civilizational chain if you remove these mechanisms. Almost all the way down to primitivism.
Whose definition of "good" are we using? Clearly not mine, as my definition of "good" demands consent.
And is it hypocritical to live in the West and take advantage of all the benefits it gained from centuries of imperialism and exploitation, while criticizing that behavior?
I'm not against taxation, but that's some BS logic.
Unless you want to argue about people paying more in taxes than they (feel they) get in benefits. In which case, well, the most rabid anti-tax people generally are getting far more benefits than they pay for (and are busily re-rigging the tax system to tilt even more in their favor).
If the claim was that anti-tax people demand both not paying tax and that others do, then I wouldn't have posted. Although I'd say that just selfish, not hypocritical.
But that is exactly it. They want all the benefits of living in a modern civilized society, but they don't want to pay their share of keeping that society going.
Also, the claim that it's all hypocrisy reminds me of this bit from the TAL episode "What Kind of Country":
Jan Martin: And a gentleman came up to me and actually thanked me for the adopt a street light program. He had just written a check to the city for $300 to turn all the street lights back on in his neighborhood. And I did remind him that for $200 if he had supported the tax initiative, we could have had not only streetlights, but parks and firemen and swimming pools and community centers. That by combining our resources, we as a community can actually accomplish more than we as individuals.
Robert Smith: And he said?
Jan Martin: He said he would never support a tax increase.
I think the ideas of anti-taxation is often hypocritical, too often you see people critize tax cuts that do not serve their other beliefs. Mind you, this is not an argument against tax cuts, I just think anti taxation is an pipedream.
There is some level of self-sustainment but it's a myth how 'independent' people really are.
They might be detached from the federal side of things but they still also have to interact at a state level.
only when competing against imports from defacto slaves in other countries..
Roads alone are very expensive, over a million bucks per mile in rural areas. Wyoming has 33,000 miles of road serving a population of 550k. That works out to at least $60k per person in just to build the roads, never mind maintaining them. And not having these roads means higher transportation costs, which translate to more money spent on goods and more profit being lost to transporting sales.
There are plenty of countries in the world without individual taxes, they just also happen to be places most people don't want to live.
This is a commonly repeated myth, but is not usually true. Road costs are far lower than often claimed. A 2-lane asphalt road construction costs about $800k on average and lasts approximately 30 years with proper maintenance. (Using MDOT numbers, since that's what I happen to have on hand).
In Wyoming, this works out to $1,600 per person per year ($133/month/person). But that assumes every single road in Wyoming is paved -- they aren't. I don't know the accuracy of this, but the University of Wyoming claims only 20% of a county's roads are paved in the state, on average, so real costs are probably much lower.
In states with any significant city whatsoever, the costs drop dramatically. Michigan, for example, has 120,256 miles of road serving 9.9 million people, 75% of which are rural. That's a total road cost of about $360 per person per year ($30/person/month).
[0] https://osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2015/fed_budget_fy201...
I can't find a more recent pre-compiled source, and too lazy to run the numbers myself. I doubt it has changed significantly enough to make the
Not in the US, which is mostly the offender, and no country will ever attempt to attack it (domestically), even if US kept just 1/10 the military resources it has, unless provoked purposefully for months on end into doing so (e.g. Pearl Harbor).
I feel like this comes up any time someone does something to avoid paying taxes, as if that necessarily means they want no government at all. They (the farmers) will see no appreciable difference whether they pay the tax or buy the tractor, so they choose the tractor. That doesn't mean they don't want roads.
My point: Nobody wants to pay taxes they don't have to, and farmers are no different from upper-middle class blue state residents in that regard. It doesn't mean they literally don't want roads.
That blue state residents already pay more in taxes than they get back is irrelevant. Nobody wants to pay more in taxes, and that doesn't mean nobody wants roads.
Bullshit. I'm happy to pay more in taxes if it means that the society I'm a part of improves as a consequence.
Whether money from a tax increase is well spent is another question, however.
I wonder if this is the result of most people taking the standard deduction instead of itemizing at tax time.
But that being said, a 15-30% discount because you used a different credit card to buy it is a pretty good incentive.
I'd venture that a lot of people are typing all this info into their tax software, which summarily throws it all away without them really understanding that that's what's happening.
Regular folks just do not get this stuff and it's silly that we have such a complicated system.
See also: depreciation on a $150K tractor I didn’t need.