I don’t know if anyone’s really noticed but since it’s tax season, I’ve been thinking more and more about taxes.
Our entire world revolves around taxes. I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and actually thought about it.
Think about it. When you get a paycheck, tax has already been taken (unless you’re working illegally, then you should get your butt kicked, j/k).
Now you go out to the supermarket to feed your family, and guess what? More taxes on your food (not all foods).
You go to buy clothes, you pay tax for that too (most states).
Okay, so you’re tired of paying taxes and for once would like to make some profit. So you invest in the stock market or in another investment opportunity, but after making the profit, you get taxed on that too. What a bummer right?
Man, just thinking about this makes me depressed. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get taxed for more than 50% of our life savings.
Ever think about all the stuff we're taxed for? Take a wild guess, what percentage of the money earned does an average person get taxed in their lifetime?
dollarish.com
Mr. Savings
Comments (7)
I don't know. I hate math, therefore I hate money. More accurately, I hate finding out at tax time how much money I don't have. :(
But there's no way I could answer the above question since numbers make my head spin.
Taxes are actually never part of living in America. But since the government made it illegal to not pay taxes, well, you have too.
A comment on the food: I don't know where you are, but you shouldn't have to pay taxes for most foods at the supermarket (since it is a necessity).
But if you think about it, you wouldn't have public transportation, federal programs, etc. without taxes. It's a double edge sword.
in CA - we have to pay taxes for every purchases. i went crazy when i realized i didn't hv to pay sales tax for buying clothes in Minneapolis on a business trip.
in order to make my tax money worth, i've decided to send my children to the failing public school, claim as much unemployment insurance as possible, drive on the road as much as possible, take classes (like dancing and languages) at the local community college instead of private classes, uses the general hospital and any state own health services if possible, and spend my sat afternoon at a state park/biking trail instead of a shopping mall! :P
Whoa. I'd like to know how much that'd be at the end of the year. If someone would keep up with everything they bought / spent, and the tax, it'd be great to see how much they devoted to taxes throughout their year.
I'm from Canada, so the more money you make, the more you are taxed. I think the highest tax bracket gets taxed about 40% of their yearly income.
Our taxes go to, among other things, our public health care system, which isn't perfect but I wouldn't trade it for privatized health care. Oh, and the govt needs money to fund things like, oh, infrastructure, public transportation, funding for the arts...
So you can complain about paying tax, but govts needs to raise money somehow in order to keep the country in decent shape. :P
@Nicola_Six@xanga -
It wouldn't surprise me if the top income bracket in Canada would be taxed higher than that. The highest income tax bracket in the U.S. was around 39% during the 90's and early 2000's (and it's still at 35% now). When I was in Vancouver in summer 2004, somebody I met did mention tax rates of 50% (although they didn't specify what incomes this was on, or if it was their highest or not).
"Oh, and the govt needs money to fund things like, oh, infrastructure, public transportation, funding for the arts...
-- But a lot of this stuff can be done with much lower tax rates (and it's highly debatable whether funding for the arts needs intervention from the federal government-- private funding in the U.S. outweighs public funding, and many question whether this should be a role of government anyway). But if the U.S. government was only spending on infrastructure and things like that, we'd only need a small fraction of the income we actually bring in. Sure, we need some level of taxation, but it seems today that the government is shelling out billions of dollars to special interest causes that it has no business being involved with anyway (and that's not even counting all the bailouts we've currently been seeing), but somehow we've gotten to the point where the government has it's hand in almost everything.
"our public health care system, which isn't perfect but I wouldn't trade it for privatized health care"
-- Be careful not to confuse the U.S. model with what a truly free-market model of health care (or at least something close to it) would be. Free-market and privatized aren't necessarily interchangeable terms (you never implied this, but I thought I'd throw it out anway, lol). The government here is very invovled in the medical sector, and our government actually spends more on health care PER CAPITA than any other country in the world. So it's not that we're not spending the money, we're just horribly inefficent at it (surprise, surprise, lol). Basically, the primary thing all this spending has done has been to jack up the cost of health care (just like we're doing with education). So it's almost as if we've got the worst of both worlds. All of our spending gives us debt and the higher costs you would expect from a socialist and/or government run-system, but at the same time you still have to pay out of pocket. I feel that in a truly free-market system, we would see costs be MUCH more reasonable, R&D would be more effective, quality of care would be better, hospitals would be better staffed, etc. The downside? You have to pay for it out of your own pocket, and not just through the tax dollars of others. But even that's not guaranteed. Back before the government became heavily involved in subsidizing health care, "free clinics" or "pay what you can" places were much more common.
I don't know that ANYONE realizes the level of taxes they pay, it's more like 85% of total lifetime earnings (this I can prove, but requires a spreadsheet posting, not sure if that's possible). So ... I'll start with a small example, let's say bread, and we should be able to extrapolate out from there without too much interferance from any broad based assumptions:
1) Farmer earned money last year = it is taxed.
2) Farmer takes some of the remaining money from last year to buy seeds for this years crop, it is taxed.
3) Farmer drives home with seeds to plant, gas taxes to drive, insurance, registration fees to drive, taxes paid.
4) Farmer pays help to plant seeds, payroll tax/fica/etc. taxes paid.
5) Farmers seeds grow in the ground, on which he pays property taxes.
6) Farmer waters seeds, pays for water, pays taxes on the electricity and water to put into the ground.
7) Farmer harvests crop, pays taxes on equipment used, taxes on labor used, taxes on fuel used
8) Farmer stores crop for shipment to processing plant, pays property taxes on land used to store crop.
9) Truck comes and picks up crop to take to plant, it too, has paid taxes on fuel, transportation fees, usage fees.
10) Truck goes to processing plant, paid taxes on the fuel used, processing plant processes crops.
11) Machinery, land, employees, electric, water, sewage, are all taxed at the processing level.
12) Finished goods are picked up by truck to go to supermarket, again, fuel, usage, insurance, etc. taxes paid.
13) Goods transported to supermarket, fuel taxes, usage taxes paid.
14) Goods are placed on supermarket shelves, employer pays taxes on payrool, unemployment, fica and property tax for the storage location and rent for the space on which there are sales taxes.
15) Bread is purchased by consumer, who pays tax on the purchase of the bread.
16) Consumer takes the bread home and eats it, toasting means utility or electric taxes, disposal of trash means taxes on garbage collection and human waste processing pays taxes on sewage to city for processing.
FROM the CONCEPT of planting a seed, to the final human waste of the seed product, there is a tax in EVERY STEP of the way.
NOW ... think about EVERY OTHER PRODUCT YOU BUY, EAT or USE and this is true for EVERY ONE OF THEM!
I do NOT understand why we allow this, it is madness and Democracy will fail as a result of too poor of a process of representation, too profound the habit of waste, and no effective feedback mechanism to stop it.