javaman - As I understand it, although they take out more taxes on bonuses, you aren’t actually taxes at a higher rate for that income. Your W-2 only has the one line for Wages, Tips, Etc. So presumably you’ll get your extra money back when you file your tax return. I suppose they take the extra amount out so you’re less likely to have a tax shortfall and owe the gov.
StG
Some Americans who don’t want to pay taxes are greedy, or lazy, but hardly all of them. Here is a quick take, that is hopefully not too inaccurate. The US government was founded on the principles first spelled out by Locke. In his treatises, Locke makes the claim that individuals created governments to protect them other individuals infringing on their “inalienable” rights - rights that can not be signed over. Among these inalienable rights, is the right to the fruits of your labor your property. Locke then points out that if a government takes your property, the governed are no better off than before they formed the government - unless the governed give their assent.
In America, most would agree that they have assented to pay some taxes. But most also feel they did not agree to the manner in which that money is spent or collected, or for any particular tax. You notice the number who object to military spending, school spending, etc. I object to social security, because I think few Americans really understand how it is collected, and the extent to which it is regressive. (You only pay on the portion below a threshold value, which is regressive. Your company pays an equal share, which you never see, and so do not realize just how high a share you pay.)
Very few see the system as fair. Some, including myself, do not think there is a fair way to implement an income tax. Others disagree with property tax. Our schools are funded by property taxes. So a poor farmer with a lot of land might pay a lot, while a rich stock trader, who rents an apartment, might not pay any.
Americans also disagree on the purpose of government, which is the sole reason for taxes. Some follow the Libertarian, Locke, tradition that a government exists soley to protect the rights of the governed. Others feel the government has the obligation to help solve various societal problems. If you are in the former group, you are likely to see the US government as out of control, way to big, and demanding too much money - hence the whining.
Priceguy, most people who object to income taxes are labouring under the belief that they pay some of the highest taxes in the world, and have no wish to learn otherwise.
They also object to income tax in its form as a redistribution of wealth-- this smacks some of socialism, or outright communism, and didn’t the US fight communists for decades?
They do prefer sales taxes, or user pay taxes, under the belief that wealthy people buy more stuff. While this is true to a certain extent, there is eventually a plateau effect for spending. When your income gets high enough, it’s impossible to spend the same percentage of your income as you did when you earned less. (How many people earning $50,000+ are living paycheque to paycheque?)
I say all this as a Canadian looking in, and knowing some Americans who earn more in a year than I do in ten…
Yes, our taxes are much lower than those of other Western democracies and for that we should be grateful. However: Many Americans tend to have an individualist streak a mile wide, which is pretty remarkable considering despite our celebrated girth, most of us are less than four feet wide. For the most part, that’s why many US immigrants, going back to the Mayflower, came here in the first place. Freedom. Being forced to share a potion of that for which we have worked is not our idea of a good time, “necessary evil” that that may be.
We are a diverse, heterogenous population with little sense of a collective or common anything. We’re free agents selling our services to the highest bidder. We’re not so loyal, for the most part, either.
We have a huge landmass with a very weak neighbor to the south, a very cooperative neighbor to the north and vast oceans to the east and west. We have never been invaded in the traditional sense of the word. Everyone making sacrifices for a common cause is a relatively foreign concept here.
We are a nation of rugged individualists, cowboys out on the prairie with our six shooters and frontier justice.
Have I offended everyone yet? It’s a generalisation, but I think there is some truth in there.
Also, as a corollary to this, poor people tend to spend more of their income percentagewise than richer people. So a consumption/ sales tax would have a disproportionate impact on those who spend more of their income. (the “lucky duckies” under the current system).
This is why a flat tax also would be problematic. It seems superficially appealing that everyone should pay 25% in tax, but when you get right down to it, a 25% flat tax would have a greater effect on those lower on the income scale than those above it. It’s much easier to live on 75% of 200,000 than it is to live on 75% of 20,000.
Sorry, not true.
While all income worldwide is subject to US income tax, as long as you meet certain requirements, the first $75,000 or so of your earned income is not taxed.
If you live overseas and work for yourself, you have to pay US social security taxes. OTOH, if you work for someone while overseas, your income is not subject to US social security taxes.
First off, I tend to self-identify as conservative. That generally includes a suspicion of any real need for additional taxation. I’ve been told on this board that I sound more like a Libertarian, but I read Reason for many years and ultimately decided the Libs don’t really have it together on roads, fire engines and the like.
So, I don’t mind paying some taxes for what I recognize as promotion of the general good. The national good comes first, and then we try to help the rest of humanity.
So what twists people* off about taxes?
A perception of waste and inefficiency in government probably leads the parade. People who spend their lives at the public trough hand out dollars to dubious efforts while those of us busy generating revenue for them don’t have a chance to muster the time to master or counter the issues involved.
Many issues are polarized, and any government expenditures that appear to promote one side or the other represent an expenditure of your money to enliven the side of the debate you detest. Any time we buy a tank, the pacifist liberals are upset; any time we buy a picture of a crucifix submerged in urine, the Christian conservatives are upset.
That leads well into the social engineering issue. Manny peoples are prickly about that, on both sides of the aisle; and taxation funds whatever happens there.
As has been mentioned, the U.S. enjoys a relatively high degree of compliance. Part of the issue that tax complainers often mention is that, with payroll deductions, many of us never see that money, so we don’t complain as much as we might if we had to write checks to Uncle Sam ourselves. Which many might fail to do.
But the self-employed and those with any kind of investment income surely know about that. If you’re self-employed and making ~$30K a year, it’s a real pain to summon up the $1500 or so that you need to send Unca Sam every three months. It was my biggest bill when I was self-employed.
Now I don’t know how Scandanavians feel about their taxing authority, but the IRS here is perceived as a very heavy-handed government beauracracy. They make their own rules, and you definitely need professional help if they come after you. I was audited for three consecutive years, and came out owing not a penny, but they treated me like s***. And did their damndest to make me worry.
BTW, there are plenty of people who are not happy with property taxes. They are, for one thing, perpetual taxes on certain thing you own, that you paid for with already taxed money. But the primary kicker on that issue is that property values for taxation are so arbitrarily assessed, by people who are driven to soak you for the most.
I don’t know what you consider the “working class,” galen, but I sure consider myself part of it. And I herald capitalistic efforts.
Here’s a recent economic breakdown; remember that there are vast regional differences.
Houston Chronicle, January 13, 2003
% Share of Income Average
Group Total Taxes Split Point Tax Rate
Top 1% 37.4 >$313,469 27.4%
Top 5% 56.5 >$128,336 24.4%
Top 10% 67.3 >$92,114 22.3%
Top 25% 84.0 >$55,225 19.1%
Top 50% 96.1 >$27,682 16.9%
Bottom 50% 3.9 <$27,682 4.6%
The bottom 50% pay, at best, token taxes.
*Sounds like it’s not just Americans; I’d had the impression that our Ozzie friends possessed somewhat of the same streak of individualism that, if you listen to the left, we are plagued with. 
Know what ticks me off? I pay $4,000 per year in property taxes, mainly so my neighbor’s kids can get a free education. (I don’t have any kids.) But the people renting the apartments up the street don’t have to pay anything to educate their own kids.
I don’t like federal or state income taxes; both systems are badly in need of reform. But I pay them somewhat cheerfully, in part because I reap some benefit from these taxes and mostly because the IRS will take away everything I’ve worked for if I don’t.
But I strongly feel that asking people without children to pay tuition for people with children is injust. I’ve heard various arguments:
You’re justing paying for your own free public education. No, my parents paid for that.
Someone has to pay for it. OK, why not the parents of the children getting the education?
It is important to our country that we have an educated workforce. Have you seen the kids coming out of public schools these days?
I’m not against income tax per se (just me doing it - I hate forms and everything. If I could just throw some money at the goverment to make them leave me alone, I would). But from what I understand, those against it… um… something about initial coercion. And fraud and free and honest people… or something. And giant squids. Apparently giant squids love income tax. Communist giant squids.
Landlords/Apartment owners pay property taxes on the aprtment buildings. I’m pretty sure they do not eat this cost but instead use a portion of the rent to pay property taxes. So apartment dwellers DO pay property taxes, just not directly.
Brian
Renters pay property taxes as part of their rent. I’m pretty sure my landlord isn’t giving me a free ride, tax-wise, when he set my rates.
And don’t worry about paying for the kids’ education-- you’ll get some of it back when they’re paying for your pension fund. Live long enough, and you’ll get all of it back.
Federal Income taxes don’t pay a significant amount for schools in the US; the vast majority of school funding is state or local.
Police are covered by local funds, not federal.
Private, state, or local.
Local or state.
That’s easy, the federal income tax doesn’t provide those things, and the federal income tax is the one people generally protest against. You want more of an answer than that? Well, I’m not going to bother - if you wanted serious debate and not a chance to chide those terrible Americans for insufficiently worshipping the almighty State as provider of all good things, you’d have put it into GD.
You may not feel like you have much of an interest in making sure the neighbor’s yard-apes are educated at the taxpayer’s expense, but you really do. It allows the vast majority of the population to receive an education that they otherwise couldn’t afford. Private schools ain’t cheap, and if everyone had to pay for their own children’s education, most kids would go without.
The free (or at the university level, very cheap) public school education most of us got keep society going, and allows us to pay for whatever products or services it is that you sell. Most of the people who frequent whatever line of work you’re in have jobs due to the free primary school education they got, and if they attended college they probably went to a state university where the tuition they paid wouldn’t even pay a single professor’s salary. An ignorant and uneducated populace would be a much greater expense to society as a whole in the long run. That’s why state laws don’t just make education available for kids, but mandatory: send them to private school, send them to public school, home school them, whatever, but they gotta go to school.
Riboflavin, in defense of Priceguy, he was specifically responding to a poster who claimed to be opposed to all forms of taxation.
And that poster was Australian to boot, not American as Riboflavin seems to assume.
Worse…I am a New Zealander living in Australia
Personally, I’d like income tax a lot more if they could just take the right freakin’ amount out of my paycheck. Every year, I get some pitiful return or some piddling little payment that I have to make. It’s annoying, and it hardly seems worth it. I’m stressing over this skata because I owe the Illinois government $2.02? Why couldn’t they just take the right amount out of my check in the first place? Then I wouldn’t have to deal with it!
…otherwise…taxes aren’t so bad. Then again, I’m not exactly making all that much, so I’m getting mostly returns, which is nice :).
You know what my mom said, when she was still working, to people who complain about taxes that support schools? “It’s so much less than social security that I don’t even notice it.”. I pay $1100 a year in school property tax. That is an embarrassment to the local public schools. My federal income tax comes to about 6% of my income. Social Security and Medicaid, when you count the employer matching contribution, is somewhere around 15% - and they keep stuffing more and more into Medicaid. I don’t mind helping the indigent elderly, but Medicaid costs me half as much as my family’s corporate sponsored health insurance. And they wonder why so many families can’t afford insurance.
By the way, I favor a flat tax with a large deductable. Who do you think gets loopholes put in the tax code? Poor people?
And one last thing, yes pretty much everyone lives paycheck to paycheck. Certainly those that make $50K, everyone I know that makes $100K. I suspect event that top 5% does. You just keep buying bigger houses, and more expensive cars.
Having re-read this statement I found that it’s actually quite a nasty one. No, I did not want debate on US income tax. Being Swedish, I have next to nothing to add and no interest in the subject. I’ve just picked up vibes from Americans that income tax (specifically, not other taxes) is generally hated and reviled, and there are thousands of kooks trying to avoid it through various means, and those same kooks display conspiracy theorist symptoms. I was wondering why. That was the point of interest.
I was not looking to chide Americans for anything. I wanted people’s opinions, not a debate. Some people can’t leave it alone, I guess. Yes, I did err myself. Never said I was perfect.
Slowmindthinking:
I don’t live paycheck to paycheck. I’m in the top 5%. In fact, I save about 25% of my income. Moreover, none of my friends in a similar income bracket live paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t generalize. Someone is almost certain to come along in the next five posts and prove you wrong.