What do your taxes pay for?

Cuddles said:
Yes, we should ban all doctors, teachers, police officers, scientists, and so on from voting. After all, what could possibly go wrong when you prevent most of the educated population from having any say in running the country?
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Given every party promotes policies that will result in individuals either being better or worse off there is a potential conflict for nearly everbody. Perhaps we should restrict voting to those unaffected by the Uk tax and benefits system, or 'Tory peers' as we like to call them.
 
About 90 percent of my state and local taxes go to education, public safety and roads. Some of the rest goes to parks, and trails that let everyone enjoy a hike instead of just wealthy property owners.
 
Lothian said:
Given every party promotes policies that will result in individuals either being better or worse off there is a potential conflict for nearly everbody. Perhaps we should restrict voting to those unaffected by the Uk tax and benefits system, or 'Tory peers' as we like to call them.
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Perhaps we could all get some anonymous Danes to do our legislating for us?
 
Beerina said:
Letting people keep their own money is not freakin' subsidizing them. It's just government not actively harming them via taxation. This is the "evil" in the description of taxes as a "necessary evil".

I encourage less, not more, of this "subsidy" of the government not actively harming people.

I can feel the vibrations of peoples' knee jerk reactions starting to uncoil already. "Must...point...out...goodness...of things done...with taxation..."
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The description of taxes as a "necessary evil" is simplistic and juvenile. Taxation, in the broadest sense, is an organized funding system for the infrastructure of civilized society. What's so wrong about that?

Letting some people not pay taxes when other do means that the people that do are paying more to cover for the cost of infrastructure and services shared by all. This is subsidization no matter how you slice it. It may be right and it may be wrong, depending on the situation. But it sure as hell is subsidization. In the case of the independent congregation around the corner, I don't have much of a problem with it. But when religion is big business, like the Catholic church, the mega televangelists and Scientology, I'm mad as hell that they get to reap their profits tax-free -- at my expense.
 
Beerina said:
Letting people keep their own money is not freakin' subsidizing them. It's just government not actively harming them via taxation. This is the "evil" in the description of taxes as a "necessary evil".
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Well, there's the little matter of the roads, sewerage, water supply, policing and national defence that those of us who pay taxes are supplying free of charge to those who don't. Or don't churches benefit from these infrastructure items? Maybe not the sewerage; that would explain why so many of them are full of ****.

Dave
 
Beerina said:
Letting people keep their own money is not freakin' subsidizing them. It's just government not actively harming them via taxation. This is the "evil" in the description of taxes as a "necessary evil".
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paying EMS, FDNY, and NYPD employees...."harms me"?

how so?

how does it harm me to pay DOT workers to keep patching pot holes and improving roads?

how does it harm me to pay the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Unit?
 
geni said:
Removing pensioners from the voting population would have an interesting effect.
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haha - holy crap - we'd end up with legal weed and gay marriage in one fell-swoop!

Out with the old and their archaic prejudices - in with the new I say!
 
Sounds like a lot of wacky weed being smoked by the above posters in this thread!

Are none of you familiar with what the Grace Commission Report (during Reagan Admin in USA) said about income tax in the USA, and is surely applicable to Canada)?

Excerpt: With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.

Then, back in 1946, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (the owner of the voting shares of the Bank of Canada), stated in a speech to the NY Law Society: Mr. Ruml read this paper before the American Bar Association during the last year of the war [World War II]. It attracted less attention than it deserved, and is even more timely now, with the tax structure undergoing change for peacetime. His thesis is that given (1) control of a central banking system and (2) an inconvertible currency, a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue.

All taxation, therefore, should be regarded from the point of view of social and economic consequences. The paragraph that embodies this idea will be found italicized in the text. Mr. Ruml does not say precisely how in that case the government would pay its own bills. One may assume that it would either shave its expenses out of the proceeds of taxes levied for social and economic ends or print the money it needs."

Further down in the speech, he reports: "What taxes are really for:

Federal taxes can be made to serve four principal purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:

1. As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;" (The other three don't apply to income tax)

Thus, the income tax is strictly a means to take money out of circulation to maintain the CON-fidence in the phony fiat currency.
 
My tax dollars pay for County Commisioner Todd Strtoger's Friends and Family hiring plan, bloated school bureaucracies/administration, sweetheart pension deals for public employees, union votes for Pat Quin thanks to his "nobody will be laid off at least until 2012 even though we can't afford it" deal with the state employees union, "fact finding" trips all over the world for Mayor Daley, city contracts for all of Daley's childhood buddies, free cars for state employees personal use, insider deals to financial brokers, bloated state and municipal agencies, some of which 30% of the workers call in sick on any given day, parking meters leased for 75 years for 30% of what they're worth, needless office remodels necessary to spend every last penny in the budget so more can be requested next year, etc etc etc.
 
For crying out loud Wildcat, read the OP! This thread is for listing government programs you find useful to you, not to launch into another of your wild right-wing anti-government rants.

You're saying you don't benefit from public education, public defense, firefighting, police, inspection agencies, social services, infrastructure, research, sanitation, building / electrical / fire codes, or the public court system?

Or are you saying you're personally benefiting from County Commissioner Todd Strtoger's hiring practices? In which case you're being a hypocrite.
 
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Blue Mountain said:
For crying out loud Wildcat, read the OP! This thread is for listing government programs you find useful to you, not to launch into another of your wild right-wing anti-government rants.
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Being against corruption and waste makes me right-wing?

You're saying you don't benefit from public education, public defense, firefighting, police, inspection agencies, social services, infrastructure, research, sanitation, building / electrical / fire codes, or the public court system?
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1. Public education here sucks. High school graduation rate ~50%, and even those that do graduate function at a 6th grade level.

2. Public defense, firefighting, police - All being shafted due to the high cost of corruption and waste. The state is billions of dollars behind in their payments (over a year in some cases) to state vendors supplying those state services, and many of those companies are now going bankrupt. The Chicago police haven't had a contract in years, and are severely undermanned (by about 3,000 officers IIRC). You see, these items take a back seat to the corruption.

3. Inspection agencies, social services - also suffering from said lack of payments to state vendors, and also thoroughly corrupt here. Felons and the mentally ill getting housed with the elderly. City officials tipping off nursing homes as to when inspections are coming. The building inspectors are hired according to clout, not knowledge. Thus, a porch approved by one of these clowns collapses and kills 13 people, and the newspapers discover the 19 year old son of the carpenter's union is a $50,000/yr + city SUV building inspector, and nobody knows who hired him. The city responds by suing several of the survivors of the collapse for dancing on the porch. Once 2/3 of Chicago's electrical inspectors were arrested for taking bribes!

No money to pay vendors, but there's plenty of money to pay the corruption bill!

Don't even get me started on the flagrant abuse of TIF districts and funds derived from them.

Or are you saying you're personally benefiting from County Commissioner Todd Strtoger's hiring practices? In which case you're being a hypocrite.
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I'm not benefitting, I'm paying. And the title of this thread is "What do your taxes pay for?"

Mine pay for inefficiencey, waste, fraud, and failure.
 
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My taxes helped create the Internet. Funding the basic research, the definition of standards and building the original network backbone.

Taxes paid by EU taxpayers paid the salary of Tim Berners-LeeWP, the guy that invented HTML and made the web and this forum possible.
 
In an earlier post I alluded to something else my taxes pay for: building inspections. These cover building codes for when it first goes up as well as occasional inspections for fire, gas, and electrical safety, as well as elevators and boilers in buildings that have them.

Consider: earlier this year a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti. It killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 more, and made a million people homeless. A month later a far more powerful earthquake (8.8) hit off the coast of Chile. Its toll: 521 dead. I suspect a major reason for the vastly reduced toll in Chile is they had building codes on the books and enforced them.
 
Blue Mountain said:
In an earlier post I alluded to something else my taxes pay for: building inspections. These cover building codes for when it first goes up as well as occasional inspections for fire, gas, and electrical safety, as well as elevators and boilers in buildings that have them.

Consider: earlier this year a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti. It killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 more, and made a million people homeless. A month later a far more powerful earthquake (8.8) hit off the coast of Chile. Its toll: 521 dead. I suspect a major reason for the vastly reduced toll in Chile is they had building codes on the books and enforced them.
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All that government red tape involved in building permits makes it tough for an undertaker to make a living.

My taxes also pay for government regulation of water quality. In this country, it's safe to drink directly from a faucet.
 
It allows people in rural and regional Australia to receive electricity for the same price as their city cousins.
 
My taxes paid for new 911 center equipment!
City officials circumvented competitive bidding rules to steer a $23 million digital-radio contract to Schaumburg-based Motorola, according to City Hall's top watchdog and documents obtained by the Tribune.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson concluded that officials at Chicago's 911 center falsified paperwork to justify giving the contract to a preselected firm. That company is identified as Motorola in documents obtained by the Tribune through an open records request.

Office of Emergency Management and Communications officials said using Motorola would preserve "the city's prior investment of nearly $2 million" in Motorola equipment bought earlier. But the city actually paid only $350,000 for that equipment, according to Ferguson's report.

...Ferguson's report said Emergency Management and Communications' "long-running failure to effectively manage the procurement and contract process presents a significant risk to the city's emergency preparedness, fiscal security and grant compliance."
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I commend the City of Chicago for their responsible stewardship over my tax dollars and security!
 
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