Tar is harder to find these days, and considered environmentally unfriendly, while using feathers might be considered cruel to animals. I suggest 5 minute epoxy and Styrofoam packing peanuts. A twenty-first century update to a beloved old social practice.
Paraphrasing a quote Jason Trennert from on this subject: “automatic tax withholding shouldn’t be allowed. If people had to write a check once a year for their taxes, we’d have fixed this system decades ago.”
If raising taxes, inventing new ones or creating fees instead was only legal after a referndum, each and every time for each and every increase/decrease. . .
Might as well want the tasks and duties of all levels of governement codified in coercive, clear and concrete law, also subject to referendums.
But I guess that's a threat to "Our Democracy" these days.
Would likely not work. There is such a thing as a "voting cost" and if these increases were small enough (or at least well obfuscated) people would not bother. Learn liberty channel did a good presentation on that matter.
I'm of course, in lieu of feathering and tarring, not against trying. If for no other reason but to break their balls. Something is usually better than nothing.
The same should apply to healthcare. If people had to first pay for it, then be reimbursed by any insurance option they had, then the industry would lose a lot of the pricing tricks they've been allowed to get away with.
Sad that I pay so much tax yet realize the crooks in congress dole it out to cronies and garbage programs helping no one but grifters. Triple the taxes we all pay and stil go in the hole every month.
Like trying to piss out a forest fire. Meanwhile, 7 million men between age 25 and 57 are not working and not looking for work. The cost of sending manufacturing overseas to each of us is much greater than the savings we “ enjoy” from cheap labor and imported goods. Most of the savings are not passed along to the consumer
Let’s stop all taxes and just print more money since Congress seems to think it works.
Like to keep that last image in mind when I push the button to send my pounds of flesh to the gov't in a couple hours. Try to hold off as long as possible, because it's my money that I earned, not theirs.
Will be interesting to see what changes as this CY will be the first as a retired person (well, 3/4 of the year). Here's a question.....am I being greedy to think my military retirement should be tax free? It is, believe it or not, up here in the People's Democratic Republic of NY, and most states I'm looking to move to.
Alternatively, you live by a moral code - a system of ethics - that puts value in the system based on notions of co-operation and fairness, and therefore decline to game it.
Which is why the Nordic nations were so succesful in going from among the poorest in West in the 19th century, to outperforming almost all others in the 20th: the individuals and the system shared morals and ethics and strove to uphold them.
Until multiculturalism. Until neoliberalism. Until globalism.
Gaming the tax system and living by a moral code are not mutually exclusive. Gaming does not mean cheating, it means optimizing your tax strategy to maximize your return. My moral code, on the other hand, is happy to pay taxes for certain government expenditures, whereas others I am quite not fond of but I accept as part of the social contract.
p.s. I'm certain if we talk with Nordic individuals, plenty of them game their tax system as well.
It doesn't have to be, no, but it can be, and just as the system should be set up so gaming it isn't feasible or profitable (nor should it be punitive), the individual should refrain from finding the exploits - out of a sense of fairness. Reciprocativity in trust is crucial in building stable and prosperous societies; societies which are geared towards Homo Homini Lupus-behaviour are forever stuck in self-destructive loops, since there's no possibility of trust.
And of course people here game the system - but it used to be very, very few and it used to be relatively free of loopholes to game in the first place. But ever since the push for socialisation in the 1970s (leading to +100% taxes for some due marginal effects) and the neoliberal pushback in the 1990s, the system is instead set up to be game-able, though not by the common wage earner.
Easy example: everyone pays 25% VAT on purchases. But business-owners buying things for their company can file for rebate of the VAT paid on things bought for their company - say a carpenter buying tools and materials f.e.
Guess what everyone who's got their own business is doing? Chalking things up as "bought for the company" - more than 2 000 000 small businesses and fewer than 1 000 clerks checking if they file their taxes correctly equals massive tax fraud. Which didn't happen a few decades back, since everyone shared the moral value that doing so was wrong; it wasn't the intent of the rule, and people adhered to the intent.
Since we started letting southerners in, it's broken down as they bring their morals with them: "grab what you can before anyone else does it, and wreck everything you can't grab".
And people working the low-income jobs - store clerks f.e. - have zero chance of deducting VAT or filing for rebate of fuel taxes.
Unfair. And an unfair system will always fall since it loses it's legitimacy. Sometimes it's a slow reform, sometimes you get the Boston Tea Party.
I 100% agree. The tax code should be simplified and loopholes should be eliminated. Taxes, for the most part, should not be used as a lever to encourage certain behaviors. But, given the system as it is, it would be anticompetitive not to maximize returns.
Allow me to use an analogy: I absolutely hate annual performance reviews. Loathe with a passion. I don't want to talk about myself, I want to get work done. The first few years I did a performance review from this perspective, I ended up being rated poorly and my compensation reflected this. I finally figured out, if I wanted to be competitive for raises, I needed to treat this as a game and talk about my exploits like a carnival barker promoting the bearded lady. This worked, and now I treat performance reviews as one of the most important things I do all year (even though objectively that is nowhere near the case).
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The reason so many tax filers - especially businesses, people with holding in other states, people who plan to itemize their return so they can, as you say, "maximise refunds" - employ assistance because Tax Law is not intended to be understood, only complied with and be intimidated by.
It's not stupid and it might be lazy but, more to the point, it should not be anything close to this complicated.
Taxes are supposed to be like paying your portion of the cost you incur against government services. Why don't they just send me the bill? I made an error once (I omitted entries from a form I didn't have and had to pay back the extra they'd sent) and they figured it out and billed me.
Just tell me what I owe, send the same bill to everyone, and...
What - you don't think we should all just pay the same amount? It shouldn't be hard for BigFedGov to computer what 1/340,000,000 of the total operating costs and invoice me.
Invoice everyone. Charge admission into polite US society. You don't pay, you don't vote. And you definitely get dragged of the street and thrown in jail for your Mostly Peaceful Protest.
Adding chapter 1 000 000 of "Adventures in Bureau-crazy Land":
When you have student debt here, you can file for having your yearly bill temporarily waived. If you get seriously ill, or something happens that means you can't afford it or somesuch.
On the form there's a slot for "Income earned abroad". Now, if you enter say 50 000:- then your amount to pay that year is adjusted for the extra income. Nothing strange, right?
But if you enter "zero" or "0"? Then the computer scanning the form automatically applies the base-average income rate. Because reasons.
This happened to me in 2012. I got a bill demanding I pay back 250% more than what I'd been informed of earlier (you get advance notice of the preliminary amount). Heat. Attack. Later. And I call them up, going "WTF, man?". Nice lady books an appointment, I go see her, she offers coffee and cinnamon buns as way of apology and states:
"Yes, terribly sorry about this, [explanation why the computer did what it did]. It's very frustrating. You're supposed to leave the slot empty, you see. We've been having this problem since the mid-1990s, and nothing's being done about it."
Twenty years they've known about the problem, and done nothing. Not adjust the program used. Not added "leave empty if zero" on the form.
That's just ridiculous. As with almost any other crime (I did, indeed, intend that), it's like they go out of their way to crush victims and law abiders.
"Swedish bureucracy is Monthy Python sans humour."
Conquest's 3rd Law of Politics:
“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
Agreed in full. Except the voting-thing - I'm more of the "service gives you franchise"-mindset on that one.
Here, they nickel&dime you with fees too (guess they listened to Bush Sr, eh?), like this one:
Want to change how you handle your sewage, if you live in the countryside? Filing a report which you must do under law, costs you $200. Filing for approval of your new system? $900, and if it isn't approved you have file again, and pay again - each time.
So if I want to stop using the old concrete drainage-well in favour of a compost-latrine system, it's at least $1 100 excluding the actual system+labour.
No, I'm all for going back to low taxes plus pay for what you use - when my mom was born, the overall average tax-rate, all things included, was ca 50% and was considered outrageously high.
Love the last pic! You should add another pic-an image of the guillotine in France 1790-as a reminder to the thieves and tyrants of what can happen when we really lose patience with their madness.
Make tarring and feathering great again!
Because as you say murder is illegal...:)
Tar is harder to find these days, and considered environmentally unfriendly, while using feathers might be considered cruel to animals. I suggest 5 minute epoxy and Styrofoam packing peanuts. A twenty-first century update to a beloved old social practice.
And let’s not limit that to the IRS!
⬆️🚫Don’t click on that!
Reported!
Looks like it's time to go long on Big Lampost.
Don't forget riding them out of town on a splintery split rail! Ever so much fun!
Paraphrasing a quote Jason Trennert from on this subject: “automatic tax withholding shouldn’t be allowed. If people had to write a check once a year for their taxes, we’d have fixed this system decades ago.”
If raising taxes, inventing new ones or creating fees instead was only legal after a referndum, each and every time for each and every increase/decrease. . .
Might as well want the tasks and duties of all levels of governement codified in coercive, clear and concrete law, also subject to referendums.
But I guess that's a threat to "Our Democracy" these days.
Would likely not work. There is such a thing as a "voting cost" and if these increases were small enough (or at least well obfuscated) people would not bother. Learn liberty channel did a good presentation on that matter.
I'm of course, in lieu of feathering and tarring, not against trying. If for no other reason but to break their balls. Something is usually better than nothing.
The same should apply to healthcare. If people had to first pay for it, then be reimbursed by any insurance option they had, then the industry would lose a lot of the pricing tricks they've been allowed to get away with.
I wrote "Ukraine" in the Memo line on my check.
My tax accountant had a heated argument when I wanted to claim Zelensky as a dependent.
🤣
My cat uses tax forms to line her litter box. How cool is that?
"Enter the number from Box 12"
🤣
Cats are very practical beasts.
A useful function for tax forms.
Brilliant!
Don't worry you can find 535 Loophoes in congress
Is 535 Loopholes the right word for these anal pores?
LoopHOES
So THAT's what they're called!
I been using the wrong "hoe" for years.
Thank you for clarifying that issue, RG.
I’ve got 535 loopholes, cause taxes ain’t fun.
Sad that I pay so much tax yet realize the crooks in congress dole it out to cronies and garbage programs helping no one but grifters. Triple the taxes we all pay and stil go in the hole every month.
Like trying to piss out a forest fire. Meanwhile, 7 million men between age 25 and 57 are not working and not looking for work. The cost of sending manufacturing overseas to each of us is much greater than the savings we “ enjoy” from cheap labor and imported goods. Most of the savings are not passed along to the consumer
Let’s stop all taxes and just print more money since Congress seems to think it works.
Congrats, you've just rediscovered Modern Monetary Theory!
We're not sending our best. https://nypost.com/2024/01/18/news/ny-squad-member-rep-jamaal-bowman-explains-creative-way-to-pay-slavery-reparations/
Money quote:
“Where did the money come from? We spent it into existence.”
- Jamaal Bowman (D-Squad)
Grifters gonna grift
#TeamSnoutsInTrough
“If you print it they will come”…….
https://brrr.money/
"Meanwhile, 7 million men between age 25 and 57 are not working and not looking for work."
And that's just counting the men who were already here.
True
And they are all getting funds from someone paying tax to live their slovenly life.
It's almost like Free Money.
Like to keep that last image in mind when I push the button to send my pounds of flesh to the gov't in a couple hours. Try to hold off as long as possible, because it's my money that I earned, not theirs.
Will be interesting to see what changes as this CY will be the first as a retired person (well, 3/4 of the year). Here's a question.....am I being greedy to think my military retirement should be tax free? It is, believe it or not, up here in the People's Democratic Republic of NY, and most states I'm looking to move to.
It is here in OH...
Who'll build the roads (and let the entropy take them away) if you don't hit that send button?
Easy.
Learn tax law, then use tax law to maximise refunds.
For bonus credit, learn the loopholes so that you can be poor on paper, and qualify for subsidies of all kinds.
After all, getting rich is more about how to figure out how to make others pay instead of you, than you working hard, dilligently and honestly.
Howzabout we just get a new government instead?
If you haven't figured out how to game the system by the time you're 30, you have some catching up to do.
Alternatively, you live by a moral code - a system of ethics - that puts value in the system based on notions of co-operation and fairness, and therefore decline to game it.
Which is why the Nordic nations were so succesful in going from among the poorest in West in the 19th century, to outperforming almost all others in the 20th: the individuals and the system shared morals and ethics and strove to uphold them.
Until multiculturalism. Until neoliberalism. Until globalism.
Gaming the tax system and living by a moral code are not mutually exclusive. Gaming does not mean cheating, it means optimizing your tax strategy to maximize your return. My moral code, on the other hand, is happy to pay taxes for certain government expenditures, whereas others I am quite not fond of but I accept as part of the social contract.
p.s. I'm certain if we talk with Nordic individuals, plenty of them game their tax system as well.
It doesn't have to be, no, but it can be, and just as the system should be set up so gaming it isn't feasible or profitable (nor should it be punitive), the individual should refrain from finding the exploits - out of a sense of fairness. Reciprocativity in trust is crucial in building stable and prosperous societies; societies which are geared towards Homo Homini Lupus-behaviour are forever stuck in self-destructive loops, since there's no possibility of trust.
And of course people here game the system - but it used to be very, very few and it used to be relatively free of loopholes to game in the first place. But ever since the push for socialisation in the 1970s (leading to +100% taxes for some due marginal effects) and the neoliberal pushback in the 1990s, the system is instead set up to be game-able, though not by the common wage earner.
Easy example: everyone pays 25% VAT on purchases. But business-owners buying things for their company can file for rebate of the VAT paid on things bought for their company - say a carpenter buying tools and materials f.e.
Guess what everyone who's got their own business is doing? Chalking things up as "bought for the company" - more than 2 000 000 small businesses and fewer than 1 000 clerks checking if they file their taxes correctly equals massive tax fraud. Which didn't happen a few decades back, since everyone shared the moral value that doing so was wrong; it wasn't the intent of the rule, and people adhered to the intent.
Since we started letting southerners in, it's broken down as they bring their morals with them: "grab what you can before anyone else does it, and wreck everything you can't grab".
And people working the low-income jobs - store clerks f.e. - have zero chance of deducting VAT or filing for rebate of fuel taxes.
Unfair. And an unfair system will always fall since it loses it's legitimacy. Sometimes it's a slow reform, sometimes you get the Boston Tea Party.
I 100% agree. The tax code should be simplified and loopholes should be eliminated. Taxes, for the most part, should not be used as a lever to encourage certain behaviors. But, given the system as it is, it would be anticompetitive not to maximize returns.
Allow me to use an analogy: I absolutely hate annual performance reviews. Loathe with a passion. I don't want to talk about myself, I want to get work done. The first few years I did a performance review from this perspective, I ended up being rated poorly and my compensation reflected this. I finally figured out, if I wanted to be competitive for raises, I needed to treat this as a game and talk about my exploits like a carnival barker promoting the bearded lady. This worked, and now I treat performance reviews as one of the most important things I do all year (even though objectively that is nowhere near the case).
"Easy."
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The reason so many tax filers - especially businesses, people with holding in other states, people who plan to itemize their return so they can, as you say, "maximise refunds" - employ assistance because Tax Law is not intended to be understood, only complied with and be intimidated by.
https://fortune.com/2015/07/21/rand-paul-assaults-the-tax-code/
It feels better to say it is easy and that it is a moral choice not to, than to admit being too stupid and/or lazy to learn how to?
Trying out that whole honesty-thing here.
It's not stupid and it might be lazy but, more to the point, it should not be anything close to this complicated.
Taxes are supposed to be like paying your portion of the cost you incur against government services. Why don't they just send me the bill? I made an error once (I omitted entries from a form I didn't have and had to pay back the extra they'd sent) and they figured it out and billed me.
Just tell me what I owe, send the same bill to everyone, and...
What - you don't think we should all just pay the same amount? It shouldn't be hard for BigFedGov to computer what 1/340,000,000 of the total operating costs and invoice me.
Invoice everyone. Charge admission into polite US society. You don't pay, you don't vote. And you definitely get dragged of the street and thrown in jail for your Mostly Peaceful Protest.
Adding chapter 1 000 000 of "Adventures in Bureau-crazy Land":
When you have student debt here, you can file for having your yearly bill temporarily waived. If you get seriously ill, or something happens that means you can't afford it or somesuch.
On the form there's a slot for "Income earned abroad". Now, if you enter say 50 000:- then your amount to pay that year is adjusted for the extra income. Nothing strange, right?
But if you enter "zero" or "0"? Then the computer scanning the form automatically applies the base-average income rate. Because reasons.
This happened to me in 2012. I got a bill demanding I pay back 250% more than what I'd been informed of earlier (you get advance notice of the preliminary amount). Heat. Attack. Later. And I call them up, going "WTF, man?". Nice lady books an appointment, I go see her, she offers coffee and cinnamon buns as way of apology and states:
"Yes, terribly sorry about this, [explanation why the computer did what it did]. It's very frustrating. You're supposed to leave the slot empty, you see. We've been having this problem since the mid-1990s, and nothing's being done about it."
Twenty years they've known about the problem, and done nothing. Not adjust the program used. Not added "leave empty if zero" on the form.
Swedish bureucracy is Monthy Python sans humour.
That's just ridiculous. As with almost any other crime (I did, indeed, intend that), it's like they go out of their way to crush victims and law abiders.
"Swedish bureucracy is Monthy Python sans humour."
Conquest's 3rd Law of Politics:
“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
https://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/
Agreed in full. Except the voting-thing - I'm more of the "service gives you franchise"-mindset on that one.
Here, they nickel&dime you with fees too (guess they listened to Bush Sr, eh?), like this one:
Want to change how you handle your sewage, if you live in the countryside? Filing a report which you must do under law, costs you $200. Filing for approval of your new system? $900, and if it isn't approved you have file again, and pay again - each time.
So if I want to stop using the old concrete drainage-well in favour of a compost-latrine system, it's at least $1 100 excluding the actual system+labour.
No, I'm all for going back to low taxes plus pay for what you use - when my mom was born, the overall average tax-rate, all things included, was ca 50% and was considered outrageously high.
Now, it's 75%.
When grandma was born, it was 15%.
Laughing through my tears today, thank you!
Matthew is the sole tax collector in all of history that anyone has ever held in high regard.
It’s telling that even in that story it took the commands of Jesus himself to get the guy to knock it off.
Happy Tax Day!. If I was King of the US (not prince, not duke, not earrrrrl!) I'd move election day to April 16th.
Here's a great piece on the lie of higher taxes in the 1950s: https://lawliberty.org/slouching-towards-tax-day/?mc_cid=1d9a88077d&mc_eid=2f20a95d8e
"not duke"
Not even if you could be a Kickass Duke?
https://youtu.be/Co2Zt615P5M?si=Yu-cbQeMdSGXLWSw
"The Buttress of Windsor"
😂🤣
Love the last pic! You should add another pic-an image of the guillotine in France 1790-as a reminder to the thieves and tyrants of what can happen when we really lose patience with their madness.
Actually, the IRS doesn’t mind if you die because then it gets to collect death taxes.
Use all the Cal-Maine dead chickens for feathers. If you run out of tar melt all the candles you got for Christmas/birthdays over your lifetime.
If only college students Would turn thusly!!
April is the cruelest month.