It ain’t my fault you can’t make a decent argument without resorting to attacking my personal life (which is really none of your goddamned business anyways).
Yes, I LIVE WITH MY PARENTS AND I DON’T HAVE A STEADY JOB. Jesus, I GET it already. Seriously, it’s been done, and by more clever individuals than you. Get a new shtick, you’re boring me.
My original point is-do you GET advantages from the taxes you pay? Of course you do. If you can come up with a solution to fund those resources without paying taxes, I’m willing to hear them. Otherwise, it’s pointless to bitch. You can, but it’s not going to solve anything.
But then, that way you’d have to resort to actually making a coherant argument, rather than just screeching insults that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Your ‘personal life’, meaning whether or not you are a tax payer, is certianly relevant to a discussion in which you’re trying to tell me that I have to live up to my obligation to pay taxes but you obviously don’t. I’m glad you enjoy those libraries and roads that I generously help fund for you.
When will it be time for you to kick in your share again?
If you had a job, you wouldn’t have so much time in which to be bored.
Explain to me exactly why it is that I need to consider your opinion about that? You’ve obviously found a way to fund those resources without paying taxes yourself. It’s called ‘on the backs of everybody but me.’
Because instead of answering the question about your employment status and exactly what room you have to tell other people about their duty to pay taxes you decided to break out the ad hominems.
You really don’t get it, do you? This is not about all taxes, this is about temporary taxes for Item A that are now being redirected to pay for Items B through Z decades after Item A had been paid off. These temporary taxes are hidden from the public in a dishonest way.
There is a solution. Had you bothered to read the whole thread you would have seen it. Stop the temporary tax after it is supposed to end and raise income, property or sales taxes so that the taxpayers can more easily become aware of when their taxes are being raised.
Your “original point” is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.
If we’re talking about temporary taxes, YES, I agree, it’s ridiculous.
If we’re talking about taxes in general (“I’m being robbed of my money that I earned!”), well, that’s a bit different. Taxes suck, but they’re pretty much inevitable.
Or, to be more specific, that taxes are somehow “robbery.” Yes, 70-year old taxes that are supposed to be temporary are outrageous. But to go on and on about how you’re being robbed and oppressed strikes me as overkill.
It may be easier for those who shoulder the majority of the tax burden to see things like this 70 year old temporary tax as robbery when we are already taxed on the money we earn.
It’s like a death of a thousand slices. They take a bit here, then they take a bit over there, then they take some more for that 70 year old temporary tax that will never go away.
Watching the money I live on be whittled away by one tax after another is tough.
Well, that I am not arguing. The taxes and shit in this city are insane. I was, however, under the impression that you were saying any taxes at all are wrong. IF that’s not the case, that was a misunderstanding on my part and I appologize.
The law was enacted 70 years ago. So unless you’re older than that, this should not be new to you. If it was a temp measure, then the bill would have had some sort of expiration date that got moved by a later legislation. They haven’t been accidentally collecting it.
Now the guy that wants to repeal it thinks that the money will be made up the increase of liquor sales that will happen when it is lowered by 3%.
And when that doesn’t happen, what program do you cut? Road maintainence? Schools?
Tell us.
But don’t come back and say, “Taxes bad! Hulk SMASH TAXES!”
I’m saying that there comes a point when enough is enough already. If you add up all the tax that I pay on everything, sales tax and income taxes and occupational privilege taxes and wage taxes and all of it, I’m only getting to use about half of every dollar I make to actually purchase something.
I really don’t think they need that extra 1% in sales tax for those new stadiums they just had to have, or the extra 18% that’s on all alcohol due to the Johnstown flood which, if it took them five years to clean it up, was over and done with 64 years ago.
And it always goes up. Sure they cut one thing, but they raise something else even higher to more than make up for it. This has got to stop somewhere.
The bill probably did have an expiration date and then new legislation was passed extending or eliminating that date. That’s what Willie Brown tried to do here in California. There was a temporary sales tax increase to help pay for the 1989 earthquake damage. He tried to extend it to pay for other shit but it was voted down.
Now, for the third time, no one here said that all taxes are bad. We said that certain taxes are bad. We can certainly all agree that whether or not you agree with a tax, you should damn well know that you are paying it and where the money is going. Extending these “temporary” taxes is a way that politicians hide the extra money because most of us don’t notice. They should be honest about it, stop collecting the taxes after they have paid off whatever it is the tax was for and then propose a new tax for the new thing.
The tax is on alcohol. I am not sure how highly taxed it is over there, but it is for good reason.
How would you feel if they took off the “temporary” tax and added a new one because “alcohol is bad, mmmkay”? Alcohol costs the government a lot of money. If this tax was on fruit, vegetables, or something essential to living then perhaps I could understand so much outrage. Don’t want to pay a tax on alcohol? Don’t buy it.
They already make money on alcohol here in Pennsylvania, though. Booze is only sold by the state (except for some beer outlets, and then you have to get permits, which are really hard to come by).
The message that THIS TAX is bad and was done in a sneaky manner is implicit in the message.
The fact of the matter is that there is no way to sneak a tax in the people. It is a matter of public record. They may pass the law quietly and without much public debate but ignorance of the law is no excuse. “I didn’t know I was paying a tax on booze?” Well then, you’ve had enough. In a democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve.