What I don’t get is what standard they’re holding it up to.
Is there a society somewhere that runs perfectly efficiently, with no waste? It’s possible that we’re doing as well as a government can. For all we know, we might have perfected it.
Now, since we CAN identify sources of waste, that would lead to the notion that a certain level “waste” is inherent in a system. I’m comfortable with that notion. Is there a production line with 0% errors? Is there a form of communication with 0% loss? Is there a heating system for your home that is perfectly efficient?
People always say, “if a business ran that way, they wouldn’t last for very long”. Color me dubious.
All businesses have inefficiencies. You don’t think AT&T has ever wasted millions of dollars on worthless employees or inefficient systems? I can’t recall all the people where I work that we’ve hired, realized after 6 months that they are completely incompetent and then took another couple months to get rid of them.
Privatization of some government functions has pr oven successful time and time again. Some waste is inherent in every system. That doesn’t mean that you just throw your hands up and welcome every bit of it. You declare it bad and work to get rid of it one bit at a time. The internal combustion engine has been around for over 100 years and engineers are still finding ways to make it more efficient. I can guarantee that the U.S. is not working at 100% government efficiency and to assume so is lazy and wasteful.
This isn’t that hard a concept. Imagine your school announced a huge budget shortfall and assessed a $1000 fee against every student on top of tuition to get things under control. The next week they announce that they plan to build a 2 million dollar recreational facility for faculty even though they share one with students now? Wouldn’t you be a little perturbed.
Government isn’t supposed to collect as much money as it can and then decide what to do with it. It is supposed to assess real needs and then tax to meet those needs and only those needs. Waste means that it is confiscating people’s money under false pretenses. People tend to forget that money has inherent value and that value is often accumulated through work. If I am busting my ass at X dollars an hour to make ends meet, every X dollars the government takes from my check mans that I have to work that much more. This isn’t funny money we are talking about. It is time away from my family and things that I would like to do.
I think I’ve got an attitude similar to Cliffy’s – rather than paying for bullets and bureaucrats’ breakfasts, I choose to think that my taxes are helping pay the salary of a ranger in Yellowstone National Park. His name is Carl, or something.
I don’t mind paying taxes. I just don’t like the idea of the government getting any more of my money than absolutely necessary. So I strive to break even on my taxes each year by putting more money into my 401(k) or other pre-tax contributions. This year I owed a grand total of $3.70 to the IRS and $0 to the Franchise Tax Board (California taxes) – my tax-table tax was identical to what I’d actually paid to the state. It’s MY money, dammit!!
Ditto to what Johnny L.A. and others have said here. I’m a little squishy on the subject of estate taxes. On the one hand, since I’ve done nothing whatever to increase my parents’ estate (on the contrary, in fact), it seems a little hard for me to argue that I deserve the money. On the other hand, estate taxes are a bit of a penalty for being frugal.
That would peturb me a bit. However I don’t really draw any distinction between private waste and public waste. To me spending $900 on a suit is more wasteful than all the wasteful tax programs that a person who buys that suit will fund that year.
Also that money that is taken from you is given back to you (mostly). It helps to fund your retirement, your retirement healthcare, your families education, protecting you from threats like natural disaster and military conquest, etc.
There is something that Martin Hyde and many other people don’t understand about estate taxes. They only apply to the very rich; only the wealthiest 2% of Americans need worry about the estate tax.
Some politicians, protecting their rich campaign donors will tell you that the estate tax routinely causes the sale of small family farms and small businesses that pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Hogwash! Middle class people listen to those lies, and they think the repeal of estate taxes will help their own families.
When Sen. Bob Dole was still working, he pushed hard for the repeal, and many D.C. insiders called it “The Gallo Wine Tax Relief Bill.” The Gallo family had given Dole big bags of money to save them from the estate tax. The same thing is happening today. If your congressperson is stumping for repeal, you can bet he’s doing it to protect a heavy donor. Repeal won’t protect you unless you’re among the wealthiest 2%.
Interesting. You must be fairly wealthy in order to make those kinds of drastic plans worthwhile. Estates below a certain size are exempt from estate taxes. And that exemption amount is going up every year. For 2006, estates of $2 million and under are exempt from estate taxes. By 2009, this exemption will have increased to $3,500,000. In 2010, as you pointed out, there will be no estate taxes. In 2011, estate taxes return and the exclusion amount drops back to $1,000,000, unless Congress intervenes to extend the ban on estate taxes or to raise the exclusion amount (the estate attorneys I know think the latter is highly likely).
The vast majority of Americans (over 90%), if they died today, would not be touched by a federal estate tax.
Some more than others. My local and county taxes make me crazy because they don’t seem to spend them on any of the things that are important to me. If we have a snow storm there is little or no evidense that any work was done on the roads locally. Not until I get to a state highway do I see clear roads.
But taxes help make things for everyone and in general I don’t mind them. None-the-less I am for fiscal responsibility int he government.
Of course I mind. I’d much prefer to keep all that money for myself. But I accept that I live in a society, and some unpleasant trade-offs are necessary. As others have mentioned, I would like it if they kept the waste down to a minimum.
Dude! That’s like cutting off your head to cure a headache
In BC school tax is a small percentage of property tax. Education is paid out of provincial revenues mostly. 'Course, that’s just a different tax bill.
Like this?
It’s based on age and/or disability though. And deferred tax has to be paid upon vacating the home, whether that be from selling or leaving in a pine box. In regards to your thoughts about a cap on property taxes, basing it on X% of current value, or value at purchase? The proletariat bungalow bought in Vancouver in 1950 for beer money ended up being worth $600k when the owners were retired folk in 1990. (Even if tax is 1% of value, that’s $6,000, a kick in the nuts to a low income pensioner) Fine if taxes can be deferred, but if not…
Converse being if you pay based on purchase price, people will be quite hesitant to move from a property valued for taxes at $70,000 has an open market value of $400,000-and lose what amounts to a tax subsidy. This could effect property prices . ( I agree with your premise, but the details do need some fiddl’n and some people see detail fiddl’n by governments as ‘bloated bureaucracy’, ‘red tape’ etc.)
But don’t ask me, I rent. Ya seen the price of property around here?
Federal taxes, no – small price to pay for the privilege of living here.
State taxes, no – for the same reason. I’m still trying to understand why, though, last year was the first year ever where I didn’t get a refund. Anyway…
Property taxes, YES YES YES. My town has one of the highest tax brackets in a state that’s already taxed to death. It’s coming to the point where we’re no longer going to be able to afford to live here after 30-some odd years. It angers me because why the hell should I have to pack all of us up after living here for so long? Is it my fault the funds slated for the new school construction were originally misappropriated? Is it my fault that the town fathers refuse to hear anything about establishing a viable commercial base, because, shock and horror, we’ll have too much traffic going through town! The town’s passed numerous overrides within the past 2 years, property taxes have shot up 20%, the school construction is still way overbudget, and now the politicians are wondering why there are so many “For Sale” signs all over the place?
And what about the elderly? My town also has one of the highest percentages of people over 65, many of whom still live in their own homes. There are 2-3 year waiting lists for the 3 elderly housing communities in town. What happens in the meantime? If you keep misappropriating funds, keep passing overrides, and the property tax keeps shooting upward, what happens to them? Where are they going to go?
BTW, I’m not a parent. If I were, I’d probably be more understanding about the overrides, etc., since most of them are directly related to the school construction, but it just galls me that we’re being taxed to death because of a misappropration ::seethe::
Most counties have assessors who regularly update the value of a property thus upping the amount of money local government gets from the property taxes on that property.
I think there should be a cap on the total % of a home’s value that can be taxed and also a cap on the % the taxes can be increased every year. One poster has already shown the problems inherent with these taxes. The property tax only forces middle class Americans into hardship, the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-wealthy, property taxes won’t hurt them. But when middle class families have to weigh uprooting their entire lives versus paying increasingly overwhelming property taxes something is wrong.
The primary moral reason I object to property taxes is it’s a tax on something you have in holding, it’s an unrealized gain as your property increases in value. I do like the idea of having to pay a possibly substantial “property tax” at sale of a property, because then you are being taxed on the value your property increased, and a good bit of that increase could be because the community around you has gotten nicer due to the efforts of the society in which you live.
I think any family of 4 that has less than $100,000 in gross income shouldn’t have to pay property taxes, any family of 3 would be less, and so on.
And also people like the elderly who are on fixed incomes shouldn’t have to pay property taxes.
As for the estate tax issue, it’s easier to get an estate in excess of $1m than you might think.
yeesh, where’s shodan for our thread hijack when i first joined?
i don’t mind taxes at all. i wouldn’t mind higher taxes is the waste were cut down and they went to things that benefitted the common good.
what benefits the common good?
public schools
hopefully a health care system
military services
anyone wanna try to make a comprehensive list? in my humble opinion, power, water, and internet should be nationalized. the education system should be reformed, and the money for that should come primarily from that, but that’s not what the discussion is about.
taxes are good things, except they’ve got way too many loopholes. if we were to reform the tax code, i think that, because it’d be starting from scratch, they’d end up making the code worse. “they” being corrupt politicians and people who want billions instead of hundreds of millions.
I feel things that private companies could not handle effectively due in large part to the massive difference between rich & poor should be public. Things like security or healthcare for example. If security were private then wealthy towns would have tons of competent cops and poor towns would only have a handful of violent, corrupt ones. Well, that is how it is anyway but it would be 10x worse under a private system.
yeah, i completely agree. nationalized, not privatized. just making sure i’m not being misunderstood, here.
profit from things that are things for basic survival (yes, shelter is left out of this equation) doesn’t seem right to me. this also means i’m lumping “internet access” into a “basic need”. the way it is these days, it’s looking more and more like it. in about ten years, we’ll all come to agree that it’s a basic need, if we don’t already.
furthermore, cities should try and get some sort of independence from the power grid…especially…hell, only until it’s nationalized.
