IMO, there's substantial benefit to people being made aware of how much they pay in taxes.
I'd also like tax returns to be due 2-6 weeks before elections, so the figures are fresh in voters' minds. (That's not to say I'm anti-tax necessarily, just that a tighter the linkage between "what I pay" and "what I expect" would be beneficial.)
I don't think that most people even look at their pay stubs - either physically or electronically, so adding yet another sheet with a big pie chart with vague slices like FICA, Defense, etc. wouldn't accomplish much.
Taxes are also hidden in various ways.
The ACA is more or less a redistributive tax charged to your health care premiums.
More than 10 percent of your salary is deducted as employer FICA contributions, but they are essentially paid by the employee in terms of salary potential.
Property taxes and municipality costs are hidden in mortgage payments and rent.
With the exception of more education, I think the only true way to get people to understand where their taxes are going would be to not auto-deduct it from their pay checks or as employer paid or bundle them in with other payments (like mortgages), but instead send them several distinct bills to be paid in-person to some representative of the beneficiary.
For example, I think defense spending would be less popular if each worker had to write a check for a few thousand dollars every six months and go deliver it in person to the local army base.
Same thing for Social Security and Medicare if young people were required to deliver a check to individual retired persons (who, would, statistically be in far better financial shape than the millennial).
Absurd sure, but it jibes well with the related sentiment of paying everything in cash for a short interval of time to physically feel the "pinch" of paying for things that come too casually using a credit card.
It's a pretty crazy notion that our employers are the unpaid tax collectors of the government. This is precisely why the government fought all the movement toward 1099 contract work since then there were effectively more employers to juggle and more likely to not be able to collect as effortlessly as with few large employers.
And the lawmakers in the US know a dirty secret: if taxpayers had to actually write a check for their entire tax bill on April 15 each year there would be blood in the streets.
Instead - the withholding system not only keeps the riots at bay but also makes “tax day” a happy day as money rains from the sky onto almost every US household [1]. Horray, it’s TAX DAY! Honey, we’re going to dinner and takin’ the kids to Walmart to pick out a prize!
That's a common thing I have to repeatedly explain to people, that a large tax return is essentially a free short term loan to the government. I had a friend post a photo of $9k in cash with some comment in the direction of friendly prideful boasting of some sort. I replied to him informing about what happened and that he needs to update his withholding so he doesn't have a large return and emailed him some articles about the drawbacks of large returns. It's a pretty crazy world. I've also had a friend who donated a ton of his money through the year and itemized deductions and had returns in the tens of thousands of dollars. His HR department was using the family size withholding table which maxes out at like 6 dependents or something. I imagine they did so for simplicity and probably didn't have many individuals for which that table was suboptimal. I pointed out that there's a formula withholding section to the W4 that he needs to look into so he doesn't have these ridiculous sums of money come tax season.
why so Employers benefit from state provided infrastructure and from the education of workers.
Or are you suggestion that Amazon pays a tax for every truck mile they use or pay for the cost of their employees education.
and from my experience a self employment true 1099 contractors are ripped off by employers.
the point is about the interest the government takes in the ratio of the number of tax collectors to the number of tax payers and keeping that number low; it's not about the merits or abuses of the 1099 status.
It would benefit the hard right small state parties - that's one of the reasons the UK civil service has what's called purdah they are not allowed to issue information "which could be seen to be advantageous to any candidates or parties in the forthcoming election"
But in the UK we do get a yearly break down of where our taxes go - just not directly before an election
Logically if releasing at time X would benefit party Y, then it would seem that party "not Y" is benefited by releasing the information at time "not X".
No, logically, there are many more times than "X" and "not X", furthermore most countries have more parties than "Y" and "not Y".
And there are different pieces of information that could be released.
But it's also a false balance, just because two sides have different positions doesn't mean they are equal. Process abuse and dirty tricks are not okay.
