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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

But like, why? It's a worthless point. If there were five taxes of one percent each versus one tax of 20% how is the one tax somehow better? Which one would you choose, getting taxed five times or once?

It doesn't really matter that there's a FICA and an income tax and a payroll tax in the end, what really matters is the overall tax rate and if that's fair given some moral decision of fairness of sharing costs of society.

If a city chooses to levy sales taxes and hotel taxes to capture more revenue from visitors because their town is a tourist destination and want to collect from tourists more than locals that's fine. I won't weep a tear for those getting "double taxed" on their vacations.

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> how is the one tax somehow better?

Local and state taxes generally actually help you. Your local infrastructure is maintained, and your kids go to schools funded by your taxes.

Federal taxes, however, are largely transfer payments from the productive to the unproductive, as well as funding wars in areas that have absolutely nothing to do with you.

It's pretty easy to make the distinction between "good" and "bad" taxes.

I'm generally helped by my federal taxes going to help feed students in poor areas. Both from a feel good standpoint and that those students have a better chance at becoming more productive, which means they can buy stuff from me.

I also benefit from those foreign wars because they keep the US empire of cheap shipping open, so I can buy stuff for cheap from countries who've specialized in manufacturing

Completely ignoring the actual question.

>> If there were five taxes of one percent each versus one tax of 20% how is the one tax somehow better?

Would you rather pay five different tax authorities a 1% tax each or a single tax authority 20%? Not asking about the morality of those five tax authorities, in this example they're all the same.

The argument is against this idea "double taxation" is something inherently wrong. In the end it's not a matter of how many different taxes actually apply to a given transaction, what matters is the tax amounts and where those taxes are going to.

Payroll tax is a problem because it’s not accounted for in your overall tax rate, it’s accounted for via lower wages. So you have no idea what your actual income would be if not for all the taxes your employer is paying.

> So you have no idea what your actual income would be

Payroll taxes aren't some secret things which are impossible for an employee to calculate on their own. You're right, it's not usually directly shown to an employee on their paystub, but it's pretty trivial to do the math and see what your employer paid (or was at least originally liable before any weird tax handouts, but typically rare) for your salary.

I do think payroll taxes should be required to include on paystubs if even just as an informational aspect to people. People should have a real understanding of how much labor is taxed compared to capital. People see "capital gains is 15%? Gosh that seems high..." without realizing how much of their W2 income was taxed. Most people I talk to can't even ballpark what their effective income tax rate was, I often hear "oh I had to pay like $800 in taxes this year, that sucked!" No, you paid a lot more than that, you just didn't pay attention.

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