It’s always talked about in the media as if everyone cares, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a normal person complain.
Not historically, no. Were my taxes always used properly? Probably not, but I believed in the overall system generically.
But since Trump’s second term I’ve cut back significantly on Federal taxes I pay (I still pay State). I’ve converted some FTE-related income to 1099 and ceased paying quarterly and I’ve claimed 10+ allowances on W4 income to reduce taxes withheld.
I’m on a payment plan of $250/mo with the IRS and they most recently told me to just keep paying monthly as best I can.
Thing is, I owe far, far, far more than 100x that. So I guess they’ll just never get all their money. I don’t care.
In California, yes. Moreso because taxes keep rising but services keep dwindling.
You’re fucking high, California income taxes are very well structured. At $880k my taxes after deductions were like $30k.
At $880k my taxes after deductions were like $30k.
I’m not American, is this a joke or do you really pay 3.5% effective tax rate?
They probably have a really good tax guy, especially if they’re making that much. Average is typically 15-30%, and it usually depends on how you go about your taxes. Depending on deductions, especially if you own a business, and the more you can pay a (high level) tax guy, the less you pay in taxes. It really do be like that.
Personal income, and even business income, absolutely agreed (my personal for the year was $10k or just shy of 10%, my corp tax was about $900, not bad at all). It’s the other nickel and dimeing CA is famous for. Fuel taxes, property taxes because home values are now sky high, DMV fees, and then all your municipal taxes, and then all your varied county/municipal sales taxes, and plenty of others I’m not thinking of right now, and of which added together are exorbitant compared to other states. Now, don’t get me wrong, you certainly get what you pay for in terms of great weather and good quality of life compared to other states, as well as many other benefits, but let’s not pretend for a second that California isn’t a fucking expensive place to live. I was born and raised here, I’ve lived elsewhere, and I am not leaving, but absolutely California is pricey.
Cool story bro, move to Texas A.K.A. Fuck around and find out how high taxes get.
Property taxes bug me a lot. The tax has gone up over 10% each of the past 3 years. It’s adding a lot to my mortgage.
Texas sucks. Everyone talks about how much it has a low cost of living and minimal taxes because there is not a state income tax, then the homeowners insurance rates go up or get cancelled and you can count on property taxes going up 10% annually. We bought our house in 2016 and the amount has gone up 10% every year since, not including the other bond issues which increase the tax rate on top of the existing rate.
I have heard folks distantly related to me talk like the state tax rate was pretty damn important when selecting which part of the United States to move to.
They were the sort of people that would sit ( in their living room in New Zealand ) and watch fox news and go on the engineered logical and emotional weirdcoaster that sort of media offers up. This is some pretty niche viewing for folks in my country.
Did their viewing habits affect their opinion of property taxes?
I’m not sure. They could have been describing that to me, but because the local body funding mechanism we have here is called rates rather than property taxes I could have easily got that confused in with the state tax discussion.
I was kind of astounded that a spreadsheet of tax rates would play a significant part in a decision of where you were going to live.
I’ve not heard anyone ever complain about it other than in media.
Maybe you need to be more upper class to relate.
Yes. As taxes are put on the price of my labour which I sell to the owing class, I do not just loose out on the surplus value, which the owning class extracts from the value I created with my labour, but also on part of the value which the capitalist uses to buy my labour. Taxes should be abolished and the surplus value should be used to improve society. This is only possible if the owning class is abolished and socialism is construced of course.
This reads like another libertarian reinventing taxes and government as usual.
It is called scientific socialism and was invented over 100 years ago.
Do the exercise. WHO collects the surplus value? And then as that is applied to society to enjoy…
You’re describing a society with a government collecting money for the commons.
I suspect your argument is more to do with who/what is being taxed how much, and then where to apply said tax money.
Last year I owed 10k USD. I certainly cared then.
Overall I don’t think about it until I do my taxes. That said, I’d happily pay more if everyone else got healthcare, good infrastructure, and a clean environment.
Nope.
They’ll take what they choose to take. It’s 2025. Social mobility doesn’t exist, our votes are meaningless, and economic policies change with the seasons.
I have no agency, so it’s not worth the stress.
I became more aware of how much tax I was paying when I became self employed because instead of paying a bit out of each check like a w2 worker I have to pay it in lump sums quarterly.
I run a low overhead medical practice so I don’t have a tax cheat llc, I take the standard deduction every year and as a result my taxes are pretty much the same as they ever were. Even though it’s roughly the same amount (slightly more actually, now that I cut out the overhead of medical systems stealing 30-60% of my labor) there’s something psychological about paying the amount in a lump sum
I think paying taxes is important and I want to do. However I feel conflicted about spending this money because what I feel paying taxes are important for are generally not what my tax dollars fund, and increasingly so. I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment, better public schools, access to healthcare, infrastructure like roads, power lines, sewers, moving away from fossil fuels, better handling of trash and recycling programs, rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders, mental health programs including interim programs like community supports and mobile programs that exist in between outpatient and inpatient, social welfare programs that give people access to housing, food, electricity, etc
But instead my taxes pay for these things increasingly less. About 20% of my taxes go to military and defensive spending and while I do think some amount needs to go to this I think it’s absurd. Most countries spend 3-5% on defensive spending. Even China, the second highest after the US, spends 6%.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors to launder billions from taxpayer and Israel for genocide. I also resent that my tax burden continually increases despite making roughly $60-70k a year while the services around me continually decrease.
I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment,
Most people say this and I agree. And then the comment under you is complaining about paying property taxes which directly pay for these things you’d like to see funded.
I’d rather pay income tax than property tax. The problem with property taxes is that lots of elderly people in old homes with no plans to sell are getting taxed as if they have million dollar house money. They’re basically getting punished for the gentrification of their neighborhood.
If we collected that money from income taxes and capital gains taxes instead, the results would be more equitable. This would likely increase my own tax burden, but I can afford it a lot better than my elderly neighbors. They can pay when they sell their house, which is when they have the money.
I’m all for tax reform, but people need to understand what taxes pay for what stuff. I’m sure municipalities would like a different way to generate revenue than property taxes as well.
In Canada we like “sin” taxes on bad for you things. The lottery funds schools, liquor taxes fund health care for example.
I know that’s how some places do it now, but why do specific taxes need to pay for specific stuff? Earmarking the funds just makes it harder to allocate them.
In some cases it makes some sense at face value, like having road or fuel taxes pay for road upkeep, but even then it results in having to scale the taxes to meet demand, in possibly untenable ways. Also, you don’t need to drive a car to benefit from roads and related infrastructure, so even the seemingly obvious connections aren’t necessarily fair.
I especially object to using local property taxes to pay for schools, because this just means affluent areas get lots of school funding (in addition to the donations they surely get), while schoold in poor areas get scraps. Which in turn makes it even harder for students to escape poverty.
I think because when a tax is getting implemented the people want to know exactly why they pay it and what it’s for.
Here we have school boards that manage a very large area of many schools. The taxes of many municipalities pool to fund many schools. These tax systems are old and probably very hard to change. I’m sure there are better ways to do things but the political might to change the system isn’t there.
Why? Knowing that my property taxes pay for one set of things and my income tax pays for something else does nothing for me. In the end, all that really matters is how much my net pay is, and whether the government is spending its income reasonably.
In the school example, my area also pools it, I believe statewide. The schools also receive federal money from my income tax. I don’t care, as long as the schools have the funding they need. Which they don’t.
I don’t get to choose what kind of taxes I pay or what they go to (except that dollar to the presidential campaign fund), so how do I really benefit from knowing which goes where? Just pool it all and make a budget! It’s like Americans are addicted to overcomplicating things.
You’re looking at it from the wrong side. Imagine a politician saying, “we’re starting a new tax, 20% of your income”. You ask why, what’s it for and he says “everything!” how keen are you for that?
All taxes were created one at a time and sold to people individually. Politicians said “we need money for x, we need to tax y to pay for it”. Run for office on a platform of eliminating all taxes with your omnibus tax reforms and we’ll see how it goes.
So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors
Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.
In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense
Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc
But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.
Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.
So that stuff too
In general, I didn’t much. I did occasionally wish the money was not taken because I needed it, but I’m fine with the point of taxes. We all chip in for stuff we all use. No big deal.
I definitely have objected to what the taxes were used for, and definitely cared about tax disparities, but I never minded paying my share.
I have objections to how property taxes are assessed, though I’m okay with the fact of them for the same reason I’m okay with income taxes. In a monetary world, there has to be some degree of shuffling the money around to keep roads usable, in essence.
Even now, when property taxes are a much bigger proportion of my income, the numbers make sense to me based on the tax valuation of the property. I disagree with that valuation, but not so much I would complain about it. I could, in a perfect world, sell for the price they think it’s worth, so I’m not storming city hall.
But, I have heard people complain about their tax amounts rather than the fact of them. Particularly here in the US when someone moves to a new tax bracket, it can be a very upsetting thing to realize that your raise isn’t going to all go into your pocket.
Nope. Some people do care though. I’m more concerned with the interest rate as it makes a big difference to my mortgage.
No (US). Those who loudly complain are generally conservatives who can’t understand how marginal tax rates and brackets work.
(smugly) I won’t take that raise because my tax rate would go up. You’re a sucker if you want to take that raise. You make more money by taking less money.
In Britain we have a pressure group that’s inexplicably on TV every other week pedalling this lie and the one that corporation tax hurts businesses. (Corporation tax is paid on net profits, so businesses only pay if they can afford it).
What’s funny is they’re called the “taxpayers alliance” yet their narrative suggests none of them actually have any experience of paying tax.
Yes, all the time (not me though). I know a good amount of people who moved to a place with lower taxes because of it.
Depends on the tax. Progressive income tax? I don’t care so much. Flatter taxes like sales, property, gas, etc, I care about more because it affects the people at the bottom disproportionately. We only need a progressive income tax AND accountability at the top end for people to pay in. Tired of billionaires getting off free with loop holes.
I don’t really have control over it, I just take into account that about 40% of my net income is going to funding war and genocide. I wish there was a way to at least select what you were funding
