I agree. Although I prefer a society that reaches out a helping hand to those in need I also advocate personal responsibility and making whatever contribution you are able to make.
When my Dad had trouble paying the property tax he went to work for the town and worked for them for years spring and summer to pay our taxes.
If you’re in need and want help, then offer to do something productive for the help you need, or, IMO be required to.
A friend of mine who does fairly well supports a flat tax across the board with no deductions. I suggested the alternative of a large personal deduction so everybody gets their first 20 grand with no income tax which should help the poor. I have to say, I see the up side of the precedent of everybody pays something but it’s also true that although that the poorest pay no income tax {some actually get more back than they paid in} they do pay state and federal taxes through their purchases.
Payroll tax, payroll tax, payroll tax. EVERYONE pays payroll tax (FICA and Medicare).
And that might actually work (or at least it deserves somebody filling out a spreadsheet for numerous levels of income and making some charts and graphs and junk). I have no direct experience with American personal income taxes (the 1040 form, as I recall) and I’ve heard that one of claimed selling points of a flat tax system is its simplicity. How much of mine-laden labyrinth is filling out a 1040 (and related forms), anyway? I filled out my own (Canadian) taxes on a website last February. It took me an hour or two and I’ve already received my refunds.
In any case, the “pay your share” taxation system proposed by emac is not, as far as I can tell, a flat tax. In fact, it’s so preposterously complicated that by comparison, the current 1040 may as well be a flat tax. For road expenses alone, there will either have to be toll booths everywhere, or he’ll have to submit some kind of GPS summary showing where he’s driven and how often over the previous year, to be compared with millions of other citizens, to determine how many of them have driven on Rural Route X and how often and thus calculate how much each of them owes to the maintenance of Rural Route X.
This is in contrast to the current system where everybody kicks in sales taxes (in proportion to how much they spend), property taxes (in proportion to the value of their property) and income taxes (in proportion of their income through a progressive tax-bracket system with a maximum percentage) into the system, which gets doled out (eventually) to federal, state and municipal road-management agencies who allocate maintenance and repair funds as they see fit.
I’m not even sure how to go about calculating his fair share of the cost of police, fire departments, sewage systems, etc.
Only if you work for an American company in America. Most overseas Americans don’t pay this, but do pay income tax to the USA and to the state they last lived in.
I can tell you what my fair share for these are: zero. That is unless some American police/fire department is going to send a squad car or truck to Dubai. I also am pretty sure my bathroom in the Middle East is not connected to any US sewage treatment plant. My car has never driven on an American road either.
Every April 15 I write a letter to my Congressmen pointing this out, but I think I will be paying taxes to the US forever even though I have no plans to ever live there again.
I’m fine giving a helping hand, I just think as a society we should first ask “why do they need a helping hand?”
Right off the bat, what ever you set that first [20 grand] at, you’ll end up with 90% of your population at 19.99 and the remaining 10% somewhere at the top. Right now in the US a lot of social services have income cut offs (section 8, medicaid). As a result, a lot of the people (not all the people) have learned how stay just under the cutoff. This isn’t meant as a nitpick of your system, it’s just the nature of having that sort of hard cutoff point (income bracket).
It depends on how complicated your financial situation is. American popular culture makes filling out your income tax return look like something out of Kafka, but I regularly fill mine out online, usually the same day I get my W-2 (the form your employer sends you that contains your tax information for the previous year), and I rarely take more than an hour or so. Of course, I file as a single with one income stream, no investments, no dependents and almost no deductions other than the standard deduction. When you get into itemization of deductions and multiple dependents and interest income, etc., it gets more complicated.
This year my taxes consisted of 34 pages for the 1040 and related forms. I paid a tax preparer about $2000 to do it, but spent about 12-16 hours collecting information on my own. My foreign country taxes were 8 pages, costing about $1000 to prepare. Standard deduction, no dependents, but living outside the USA.
You can afford it, not paying for cops and firemen and all…
Easy, if we all have access to police, take the cost of the service, divide it by the number of people using it. Ditto for fire departments. If we all have the same protection, we should all have the same bill. I pay water and sewage based on my usage. If I use less, it costs me less, and no one is forcing me to pay for what I don’t use.
While putting out the garbage and recycling this morning, I couldn’t help but notice that I pay for recycling through property taxes, but directly for garbage.
Because the cost of garbage removal is based on the size and number of bins, I was able to choose a size appropriate to me. I am then encouraged to use less garbage (more accurately I am encouraged to fill my bin each week but never go over).
Garbage is a service frequently shifted from personal to public. And it wasn’t until I actually had to pay for garbage myself did I sit up and think “damn hauling garbage is expensive.” A user fee increases personal responsibility, and allows each user to determine what they want their share to be. My neighbours have 3 giant over stuffed bins, I have one small one, we pay based on our personal usage. I am not subsidizing his reckless over use of landfills.
There is a very real and obvious downside to this that I’m sure you’ve already started typing: what happens to poor people that can’t afford the service? The answer I’d like to see is, “they produce as much garbage as they feel they can afford.”
In reality, they dump it. Either in my bin, or in park down the street. So is the solution to have some of us pay for the rest our neighbour’s trash?
Before you reply, I need to address my recycling, which is paid for by my property taxes. First of all, I am happy to pay for a recycling system, we need recycling. But when I looked at my neighbour’s giant pile, it consisted mostly of newspapers, and beer bottles (we don’t get a 5cent refund).
So the reason I think taxes are theft is because the cost of recycling newspaper for example, should be part of the cost of the newspaper. Sure we could say I benefit from recycling, but that’s not the point. I don’t get a morning news paper (seriously, is the interweb unknown to people) so why am I not contributing to the problem. People that want to get a morning newspaper are the ones that should pay for that recycling. If they find the cost of recycling a newspaper is too much, they won’t buy newspapers, and we won’t NEED to recycle (newspapers).
By spreading out the cost, we reduce individual responsibility.
You know what might help the pro-tax crowd, what I am advocating is a system of DIRECT taxation. Not no tax, or a flat tax. I want the cost of a service to be part of the service.
If you live down a long county road, you should be taxed in proportion to the length of road. If you use a lot of garbage, consume a lot of electricity, have a lot of ipods, read a lot of books, you should pay based on your usage. If those things are important to you, you’ll pay, if they aren’t, you won’t.
And when it makes sense to, we can have a handful of services where the cost gets spread at least somewhat evenly. I’ll happily pay to have police, fire, and military as long as the cost is reasonable. If politicians start making up fire statistics to justify the purchase of long range invisible firetrucks in their district, we’re back to theft.
Wow you’re lucky. My first year of US taxes I had to figure out how to pay both US and Canadian taxes at the same time. Which isn’t entirely based on how long you live in one or the other, but more about when you file your taxes. Long story short, not an easy process to figure out, you basically have to do your taxes four different times before you know which one is right.
Year after that I got married, in addition to the joys of filing jointly we had to go through the half-resident thing again, plus now we had interest income in both the US and Canada.
Year three, had investments, lots of investments. Learned the joy that is the “wash sale rule.” Look it up, single most bullshit piece of legislation you could ever imagine.
Year 4, sold company stock options. Wow, you want to see a mess? It’s reported on your W2 like income, taxes were withheld from your paycheck. But then it also shows up in your investments, except, you have to declare both a massive gain from the sale of the stock, and then a loss from the purchase. Now we’re back to the “wash sale rule.” Followed by the sale of more stocks, but now some I owed for less than a year, some more than a year. One company had both.
Then dividends. Then a house purchase. And for some reason one of the ETFs I made a bunch of money on sent me a K-1. What the fuck is a K-1?
I just had some of my stocks go through a reverse split, can’t wait to see what that looks like next year.
What’s your “easy” calculation of the equal-billing for fire and police to, say, the 2.5 million residents of Toronto? What happens in poor neighborhoods (that might have a disproportionate need for police services) where relatively few can afford the police-services charge?
This isn’t the case in Montreal, so I’ll take your word for it.
If it’s such real and obvious downside, the result should be equally obvious - the uncollected garbage piles up, the neighborhood slides further into decay and whatever problems that might have been solvable become ever more difficult.
As it is, though, you’re describing suburban/rural services, where population densities are lower and a garbage collection company can keep track of individual homeowners and bill accordingly. That doesn’t work too well in an urban environment.
Well, or go to an island, as I’ve suggested numerous times.
D’oh! I’ve already started typing. Oh, well…
Well, newspapers themselves are a dying medium, so that problem will solve itself eventually. Interestingly, what you describe (the cost of recycling a product built into the price) is actually the norm in Germany, extended to even the packaging the product comes in. I have no objection to this sort of thing.
Jumping to “taxes are theft”, though… the Germans don’t feel that way and they’re far more aggressive about recycling than North Americans.
I find it honestly hard to get worked up about this.
Have you done any actual calculations along these lines? Seems to me people who were responsible and earned enough to buy large houses will suddenly be unable to afford to live in them (unless they are already rich, so forget about anyone in the middle class working to improve their lot in life), while people who live irresponsible lives in ramshackle inner-city tenements will end up paying nothing. You’ll end up punishing the responsible and rewarding the irresponsible.
I can no longer pretend we’re having a reasonable discussion. I may be wrong, but I gather you have this idealized vision of some future tax system that is perfectly fair to guys like you (and to guys not like you - fuck 'em), but have no interest or inclination in doing any actual calculations of what this would mean. When presented with a DCnDC’s calculation of a $52k charge for a burglary, you shrugged it off by suggesting “insurance” could cover it - a type of insurance policy that does not exist and is likely to never exist since we abandoned the feudal system and its private armies and courts and prisons.
I’m confident that no reasonable member of this board (by any reasonable definition of “reasonable”) can say I didn’t make a serious effort to analyze your proposals. My conclusion is that they are not nearly fleshed out enough to be of any value and they rely on buzzwords like “responsibility” and “theft” with no effort at analysis or recognition of consequences. You might one day win me over with some solid facts, but not with whatever you’ve presented here over the last few days.
But this is exactly what happens because your precious market system demands that investors get a seemingly guaranteed profit for their investments. If too many bad drivers make claims, your rates go up even if you make no claims.
And just how do you know if your insurance company isn’t loose with it’s money?
There’s no proveable correlation between the rates they charge and the way they spend money. For instance, not all insurance companies are publically traded. Some may have low rates and still piss money away because the owners are happy enough with the profits they reap. You’re being naive if you judge a company as “careful with money” solely by its rates.
I have presented numerous examples, all have of which you have dismissed, the recycling example as the most recent, because you think it’s a dying medium.
We are forced to pay to recycle other people’s newspapers. There is zero incentive for them to use more or less. The people that want newspapers should be forced to pay for the recycling.
The province of Nova Scotia took the 5cent deposit system one step further and added an addition charge of 5cents that goes to pay for recycling, called the Half Back Program. A 2L bottle gets 10cents added, you get 5cents back. A 24 pack of cans gets $2.40 added, you get $1.20 back. There are two results: 1.) people get to choose how much recycling they want to pay for by choosing the amount of packaging, and have a financial incentive to use fewer bottles. 2.) the cost of recycling is paid for by the people causing the need. If there weren’t plastic bottles, we wouldn’t need a plastic bottle recycling program.
So what do you think of this program? I see this as a system of how more taxes should be. This is a real life example of how my idealized vision of some future tax system would be perfectly fair to me.
It’s remarkably easy to tell if they piss away money: their rates will be higher than a company that does not piss away money (or at least pisses away less money). It’s the basis of how a market economy works. The investors you refer to are going to either demand less waste, or invest in a different company.
If the owners of a privately head company, as you describe, are happy to piss away money, a competitor can under bid them, and I can choose the lower bid.
Keep in mind, I’m also free to choose the company that pisses the most money away. Or has the best looking spokesman. Or makes me feel like they care.
I said newspapers were a dying medium, not recycling.
And I agreed that recycling costs should be built into the purchase price. I could dig up more details about the German programs which implement this on a larger scale, I guess.
The transition between this and a future tax system is what I believe you’ve given no actual thought to, nor expressed any real interest in giving any thought to. Somewhere along the path that starts with recycling, a miracle occurs and welfare sluts stop having babies, or something. How will this happen? Something to do with responsibility.
Again, you’re still ignoring the actual cost of things, even things you already pay for by usage.
Water, for example. Are you aware that your water bill would be 357% higher than what it is now without the government setting a fixed price and spreading the cost of transport and treatment among everybody?
Electricity. Subtract the government subsidies and your electric bill would be 8,333% higher than it is now.
Gasoline. 3,785% higher.
This is why the government collects taxes from those who can afford to pay and that revenue benefits everybody equally. Is it a perfect system? Not always. Sometimes those that have more will get less out of it than they put in, that’s part of living in a civilized society and benefits everybody, yourself included. I think you are being very selfish and naive if you think you can just pay for only what you personally use and still enjoy the same standard of living as you currently do.
Nothing magic has to happen except for a shift in how we view taxes and public services. Starting with the belief that “taxes are theft” instead of “taxes are your penance for not living on a deserted island.”
At least for discussion’s sake consider that we have a closed system of taxes and services. The current cost of recycling is the same whether it’s paid for by taxes or bottle deposits. And so goes most things, the cost of highways are essentially the same if they’re paid for by toll or by taxes.
What’s significant is that when people are forced to pay for what they use, they get to make the decision of whether or not they want it. As we saw with the cost of a county highway, when it’s spread out over everyone’s taxes the individual user sees no reason not to live further or closer. Put in a toll, or add the cost to their association fee, and they either decide that they want to live closer (so no highway is needed) or they are okay paying (the highway gets paid for).
So we can either start with the assumption that no one can be held responsible and society should pay. Or we can start with the assumption that each person should be individually responsible, and work from there.
Many of the pro-tax arguments are that it’s for the betterment of society. I agree that there are examples, having public schools makes us better off, police make us safer, military keeps us from speaking Chinese. But it’s not universally true. As I’ve shown with recycling and highways, having a public service can actually make us much, much worse off. We have too many highways, using too much oil, causing too much pollution, and too many deaths. The simplest way to solve those problems isn’t by legislation, it’s by directly charging the people that cause the problems and let them decide if they want to or not.
To tie this back in with the recycling issue: I have an old motorcycle battery that needs to be recycled. That is not part of my taxes, I actually have to pay a fee to recycle it. Society fucked up and put the fee AFTER I bought the batter, not before. So I’ve got this battery in my garage that I don’t really want to pay to get rid of. If there had been even a $1 deposit on that battery I would have taken it in as soon as I replaced it.
This is a direct and specific example of how we’ve made things worse. My incentive is to either bury it or toss it in the garbage (landfill) both of which make us worse off. I also have no incentive to use fewer batteries other than the cost of the battery itself. We could fix this easily by putting a recycling fee on the battery, along with a deposit.
I think we could fix a lot of things that way.
So all I’m asking is that we take that (which I consider proven) approach to more of our government budgets. Despite what you’ve claimed, I’m not an unreasonable person. If we come to a point where there is no reasonable alternative other than distributive taxes, so be it. If the distributive taxation is considerably more efficient (like having millions of tolls vs property taxes) do what makes the most economic sense.
Our modus operandiis now is to simply tack it on to income tax, or property tax, or sales tax. But NONE of those three things are related to the service provided. My level of income, value of house, or number of purchases has nothing to do with how much I drive on the highway. So if you have to twist and squirm to show how highway use IS related to those three things, you should instead look closer at where the taxes could be more directly applied.
Looking back through the posts in this thread, most of the pro-tax side seems to just take it as gospel that government run AND distributively taxed is best. The recycling issue proves that wrong.
First, please indicate if a link is to a pdf.
And the entire point of every thing I’ve written is that the failure of our current system is that we ALL ignore the actual cost of things.
Our cost for water SHOULD be 357% higher, I want it to be higher. I want it to accurately reflect the cost of usage. Then, you’d see a lot fewer people living in a fucking desert, or leaving their sprinklers running. The costs of electricity should also be higher, reflecting the true cost of running the a/c with the doors open and cleaning up oil spills.
Just like the county highway example, NO ONE (save a couple people in the construction industry) is aware of how much it costs. Nor are they aware of how much it costs to run a police and judicial system. Or how many coal miners die each year. Or how much it costs to put a kid through school.
As an example, a few years back Ontario initiated a program to send a duplicate “medical bill” to people after they received care. People freaked, first they thought they were supposed to pay it, then they realized how much they just added to our collective tab. After 20+ years under socialized medicine, my health was great, but when I moved to the US I was suddenly confronted with the reality of what an ambulance ride and ER visit really costs.
We are so sheltered from reality that we have zero incentive to act responsibly. And each time we realize a problem we fall back on government to solve it via taxation.
