>If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps
In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.
Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it?
The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k.
Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k.
Gas is double the price solely because of taxes
Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10%
Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month.
I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience.
By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.
Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.
The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)
There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?most_... a more-expansive definition from the Fed raises this to 16% [a]
Overall it's 38%: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-germany.pdf
For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc
This is incorrect (despite the citation).
Federal tax collection in 2020 was about 16% of GDP
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The OECD reports "The tax-to-GDP ratio in the United States has decreased from 28.3% in 2000 to 24.5% in 2019."
https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...
For comparison, the weighted average in other OECD countries is about 34%.
Pretty much nowhere in Europe you're paying (effective) 40% on a 30k/yr salary. Nowhere. You're most likely not even reaching that tax level.
> New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark
> Private cars: 25% of DKK 65,000, 85% of DKK 65,000-202,200 and 150% of the rest. https://skat.dk/skat.aspx?oid=2244599
So again you don't know how tax bands work (and Denmark is kinda of an exception)
Sure, it's "VAT" - but it's essentially the same thing. You pay it for almost everything you buy. There are some lower rates for food in some places. But guess what, US has that too.
> Nowhere
(it's also possible that social security is deductible before income tax is levied as per this site but I'm not looking too deeply into it: https://expatcenter.ro/tax-guide/ )
Also, if I get the linked calculator right, then it expects you to put MONTHLY salary, in RONs, not EUR. So, just putting 30000 there you get a monthly salary of over 6000 EUR, or 72k per year. And that's taxed at 41%.
In other countries you might have tax brackets, but I know from experience that it's very easy to reach 45% total tax rate (not marginal).
e.g. try Belgium, at 100k the state gets 50% https://www.belgiumtaxcalculator.com/?salary=100000&average=...
Try UK. At 50k you pay "only" 26%, but then in the US you pay almost nothing, if you have a family with kids and use the deductions smartly.
> but then in the US you pay almost nothing
Well, not really. In NY that would be 27% (converted). And you pay 31% at $100k in NY (or 34% in 150k ) https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator
Drivel.
Here in Norway (widely reputed to be heavily taxed) a single person earning 30 kUSD and having neither debts nor savings would pay 4752 USD in tax, about 15%. You would then pay up to 25% VAT on things you buy (less on food and rent).
See https://skattekalkulator2018.app.skatteetaten.no/?aar=2020&a...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Combine that with a tax prep lobby whose incentives are to sell you a solution.
The IRS could have made things as easy for most Americans as places like New Zealand did two decades ago.
The IRS is also a lot more helpful than commonly advertised - I once had a several thousand dollar expense reimbursement from work that my employer wrongly classified a miscellaneous untaxed payment to me. They didn’t attach any penalties, just sent a letter essentially saying “we think you forgot to include this in your income for YEAR, we think you owe $X + $Y interest.”(and the interest amount was very reasonable, like 3-4%)
I just emailed them a copy of the receipts and email I had sent to my employer when claiming reimbursement, and noted that I had not claimed those expenses on my tax return, if I had done , then it would have exactly matched the tax owed.
They replied a few weeks later telling me thanks and that I owed nothing extra.
I do worry about arbitrary abuse of government power in the US, particularly against those guilty of WRONGTHINK, but my personal experience was exactly what I would hope for as a citizen, professional, clear and timely.
I still would still like taxes to be lower - but if you told me I had to make a mandatory charitable donation of the same amount every year to a real charity, I would be fine with that. So in my case at least, it’s that I expect the unionized middle class government workers to get most of the benefit of my extra tax, not the poorest people in society who need it most (and who are usually presented as the need for such increased taxes)
Which is precisely why the party that is ideologically opposed to taxes will never let that happen.
Local taxes mainly go to the domestic military and schools. You only see the main benefit if you have kids in public school.
State taxes are the most useful - large enough scale to accomplish things, but small enough scale to remain somewhat accountable. But since people can easily move between states, these become subject to intense politicking. For example, "Taxachusetts" even though its overall income tax rate is only 1.2x that of New Hampshire (32% vs 27%, for incomes $22k-$52k).
I'd personally love to see a flip of the magnitude of state and federal tax rates, money flowing between the two in the opposite direction, and a way for individuals to earmark what their tax money goes to. Some ability to steer taxes towards things they value would go a long way to making people feel enfranchised.
edit: lots of downvotes, but no counterpoints. While there are many things government does that I do value, I don't think their costs add up to anywhere near what is being paid in. What value do you feel you personally get from your taxes, apart from longing for some sort of social contract?
OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example.
My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such
It’s not a bad thing to pool money for common causes, but to claim it isn’t their or our money is kind of odd.
It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.
But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.
Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?
Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.
If you're in a Western nation and you "make" money, it is very much a partnership with the state, and your ability to "make" money would very likely disappear without the state. For someone to go on about "their" money has no correlation with actual reality, and I'd encourage them to ply their trade in Somalia. I'm sure the income tax rates are great.
It's my life as much as money is my money. Yes, they can be taken away.
Never the less, you can go to any other place which didn't have slaves and they still got on without income taxes.
And, if you go to parts of the middle east where slavery exists today, income taxes have not prevented it, so it's beside the point.
Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.
But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.
As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.
It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.
We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.
I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.
It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.
"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".
I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.
It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.
As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.
Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?
The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.
I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.