Individuals shouldn't see tax. That way the voters don't complain when you need to put it up.
Sales tax is similarly a pain - particularly when you have differing rates. At which point we get into the famous is it a cake or a biscuit type cases to decide where the dividing line is.
If taxation is such an inherent good then why does it need to be hidden from people?
If the rate is justifiable the government shouldn't need to hide it. When you consider a democratic society where the government at least indirectly serves the will of the people the idea of the government needing to pull a fast one on the people or obfuscate its actions lest the people tell them to stop becomes even more absurd.
Because the externalities are not always visible, and people do not have enough free bandwidth to spend the time understanding them.
> If you get hand wavy and tell me its too complicated [...]
Unfortunately, it really is too complicated. A doctorate in economics might get you a decent way towards understanding the good that taxation provides, but given that economists still have differences of opinion, maybe not a complete understanding.
[^0]: Well it is, but only a tiny proportion.
Unlikely. Economics doesn't even understand how the monetary system works, let alone taxation.
Taxation works more like memory garbage collection than anything else. It's a cleaning up process.
It isn't an inherent good. It's just required to reduce demand and release people so the public sector can purchase them with its money.
Without it you would have inflation - or none of the public services we voted for.
The reason you pay tax is that your income is higher than it otherwise would have been without the government spending.
What people who don't like tax forget is that should you eliminate it, the increased income will be eliminated too. But not in a smooth way. Jobs will be decimated, and one of those might be yours.
The goal of government shouldn't be to obscure the cost of government services. The cost should be justified.
I don't think that's true. I think what is true, and what we've seen time and time again, is that people don't like the cost of services that others take advantage of that they don't need to.
To invert that, what exactly are you planning on doing with the people currently in the public service, which the people voted for, that is so much more important than providing the services the people voted for?
It is for the private sector to justify its use of resources, not the public sector. The public sector has a democratic mandate.
I recently had to update my W4 form at work for tax withholding, and what a pain in the ass to read and decipher. Add to that, and I had to do the same thing for my state taxes.
I want to point out that Congress has shot down the idea of making it easier to pay your taxes many times. I'm not sure if it is Intuit or some other entity, but paying your taxes should be easy. If you don't like the level of taxation, then work to reduce them, but paying them should be easy.
It boggles my mind that this is the case.
The UK PAYE (Pay as You Earn) system has a 1% tax gap[1] compared to 12.9% on income tax and 7% on corporation tax.
It's extraordinarily more efficient to tax at source.
[1]The percentage tax gap is the tax gap pound value as a proportion of theoretical liability, where theoretical liability is defined as the tax gap plus the amount of tax actually received.