Proposal: No tax withholding, everyone pays quarterly

just like small businesses.

Instead of your employer withholding federal and state income tax, and social security and Medicare taxes, every employee gets a full paycheck. Every quarter, the employee must send quarterly estimated taxes. At the end of the year, he or she either gets a small refund or pays a little extra.

Of course, under the current system, these are automatically deducted at an ever-so slightly higher than needed level so that the employee is used to his normally low paycheck and tax time is celebration with a much needed refund. But the math works out the same either way.

I only propose this so that all taxpayers can actually see what is leaving his or her pocket to pay for government. You may say that in doing so, I am attempting to lower taxes. I confess that you’ve got me there. But whether you support higher, current level, or lower taxes, shouldn’t the payer at least be aware that he is actually paying the taxes? It would be sort of a “truth in advertising” proposal that lets everyone see just how much each level of government takes and they can ask to pay more, be happy, or demand lower taxes as each person sees fit. Sole proprietors already do this with little collection problems.

If you don’t like this proposal, I would ask that you at least consider that you oppose it on the grounds that you are afraid that people will be up in arms demanding lower taxes and that you like the idea that it is somewhat hidden from the middle class so you can continue with big government.

Four tax returns a year, eh. So you want to make daily life even less convenient and more annoying for everyone, merely to bring home a dull political point. Bad luck with that.

Not to mention that this already happens in American stores, with this $3.99-plus-tax crap - and what has that achieved? Everyone else just includes all taxes in the price, like a sensible person would. So, you know, the price is the actual price.

The big issue that WILL happen is that people will spend the extra money and then yu have a whole debate on debt for the poor. I don’t see what you are trying to achieve, couldn’t this be done on your pay slip like it is done in Australia?

The Freemen on the Land would be livid, and we can’t have that.

That assumes our time has no value. At least 3 more personal days per year spent on paperwork? F that.

Surely there are easier ways to make the same point, such as printing a running total of taxes paid on each pay stub … oh wait, they already do that!

As the OP is probably, the self employed and those with a certain amount of investment or alimony income pay quarterly estimated taxes.
What’s weird is that conservatives typically moan about governmental red tape. This proposal creates more, intentionally. I say those who don’t realize that the government is taxing them should pay closer attention to their pay stubs. Freedom!

Why not just adjust the withheld percentage so that you get the biggest possible paycheck, aiming for a smaller refund? Can you not ask your employer to withhold across a range or percentages, from ~10% - 20%?

What Measure for Measure said.

Effectively this is a proposal to make the tax system more oppressive,bureaucratic, burdensome and ineffecient than it needs to be, in order to make it less popular.

But of course the same result - unpopularity - could be achieved, and probably more effectively acheived, just by raising taxes beyond what is necessary to finance expenditure, or by raising expenditure in a way which makes it necessary to raise taxes also. A conservative who favours jtgain’s proposal should, logically, favour these measures also.

Seems like a political stunt to me - increase the obtrusiveness of the government in hopes of causing an uprising of anti-government feeling. If you think there’s a problem with taxes being too high, then make your case to the voters. If you find you’re not persuading the voters, maybe your case isn’t as good as you thought. But you don’t artificially make a problem worse just so you can fix it.

There’s no real benefit to this. In addition to the personal days each year, businesses would have an extra day of work each quarter to prepare and ship quarterly W-2 forms.

People can already look at their checks, as was mentioned. I think the only thing I would add to this for the clarity to the common man would be to require employers to tack on the overhead costs, mainly the tax and medical burden for employing people, to the pay stubs.

This would help people see what sort of taxes the government is collecting for their labor, without imposing excess work on everybody four times a year.

Heck, why not make government MORE popular by holding a weekly lottery to let one constituent bitchslap their representative?

What would you say about coupling this with a proposal to require people to live a few days each year without the benefit of various government programs?

For example, let’s say that during some month, you can pick which one, people will not have the benefit of having their trash picked up by the city. Their taxes will of course be lowered by 1/12th of whatever trash collection costs for them each year. But for one month, either they have to suck it up and pile up all their trash and recycling in their yard, or arrange for a private company to come and pick it up – and pay whatever the going rate is.

Or for a few days each year, random roads will be shut down to the general public. It could be a freeway, or it could be the street in front of your house. If you want to pay a special toll to use the road, that’s okay. This would help show people what their taxes really pay for. We could even do the same thing with schools, parks, libraries, water fountains, or any other service that’s available to the general public.

We could also start a program that will replace workers at businesses with illiterates for a few days each year, just to emphasize the utility of free public education. That would be very instructive!

We could also start making taxpayers write individual checks to individual agencies. The idea is that Americans will have a better idea of where their tax dollars go. So if a guy brings home $50,000 a year, he will have to write a check for about $2,000 to the Department of Defense, $200 to the Department of Transportation, $200 to the State Department, $70 to NASA, and $100 to the Department of the Interior, etc.

Of course, those are all shitty ideas. But I do have a serious question for the OP: if we were to ask small business owners which they would prefer, a decrease in taxes or a simplification of their quarterly filing process, which do you think they would prefer? They can only pick one, of course.

I like this idea in principle, but as proposed, it’s going to cause a lot more problems than it solves. I do think it’s an issue that people don’t really see just how much of their money goes to taxes, and so actually having to actually write a check to the government will help drive that point home. The problem is, a non-insignificant number of people will fail to save enough money or won’t have the self-restraint to not spend it promising themselves to pay it back later. Sure, I’m a proponent of personal responsibility, but if that number is large enough, it ends up hurting everyone.

Second, as the current tax code exists, this basically ends up quadrupling the responsibility of the individual in maintaining their taxes. Before any sort of idea like this might even begin to fly, the tax code needs to be vastly simplified. Of course, I think it needs to be simplified in general, and I think a utility-based system that directly ties government spending to tax rates is the way to go, but if we do that, that sort of makes this idea pointless since every single time the government starts a new program or tries to cut taxes or whatever, that rate will come up.

Third, even if we did implement this, the result will be the same for most people. Speaking for myself, I have my pay-check auto-deposited, and all of my bills are on auto-pay. It’s to the point where I know how much free money I have to spend, and other than that, I can’t actually tell you what I bring home without looking at my statements. If I suddenly had to pay for my own taxes, I’d just set up a separate account, estimate my taxes, have my pay check split into that account, and either set up an auto-pay or check it when taxes were due. So, in the end, my company would still be automatically withholding for me, except it would be in an account I control. But ultimately, even when paying taxes, it would still just be numbers and I wouldn’t have that pain of writing a check.

Worse, despite that a lot of people would have the ability to do just what I described, it seems to me that most of the people who wouldn’t have that ability would be small businesses that don’t offer auto-deposit, or people who take a lot of money in tips and such. In short, it would just end up putting more burden on a group that is probably likely to consist of more middle and lower class people.
So, yes, I agree that taxes are an issue, the complexity is an issue, and the general unawareness of the actual cost is an issue, but increasing the burden of taxation seems like the wrong direction to take this. I’d much rather focus on getting a balanced budget, forcing spending to be tied to revenue, and reducing complexity and increasing transparency first.

So we make everyone save money up to make four quarterly payments, knowing that a sizeable number will fail to do so and wind up shit creek without a paddle. All this because of the flawed premise that people are too stupid to look at their paychecks and see what taxes they’re paying. The risk/reward ratio is pretty much infinite here.

I don’t like farm subsidies, so lets pass a law where once every year, the gov’t pays a farmer to come to your house, kick you in the nuts, and get to take any one item from your house to “help feed America”. That way everyone else would hate farm subsidies to!

Truly a stupid idea. Life should be made less complicated, not more so.

What does “pay for government” mean to you?

Are you talking about essential services like infrastructure, police, fire dept, social services, defense, FDA, EPA, etc… ?

Or are you talking about how much goes to salaries to people employed by the gov’t?

Actually, I have a better idea.** jtgain**'s paycheck should be itemized to show the % breakdown of taxes that go towards services he enjoys daily as part of the society in which he lives. Then he can argue that since he’s never set his house on fire, he has no need of the fire department deduction, etc.

And don’t forget a lot of people won’t send in their money. Which means the government will have to expand the IRS in order to increase its new need for enforcement. Plus more people will eventually end up in courts and prisons, which will also increase government spending. So we’ll have to raise taxes in order to cover the higher cost of collecting taxes.

As a plan for shrinking the government, I think this could best be described as Reaganesque.

That does not seem fair, were any of Reagan’s idea that dumb? I mean the Ketchup is a veggie thing was stupid but it would not cost the government really and was not really a major inconvenience. I think a few of the James Watt Interior Dept. decisions may have approached this but I cannot think of a specific one.

No, my point was that Reagan said his goal was to shrink the government but both the amount of government spending and the number of government employees increased during his administration.