Similar in Norway. You receive a pre-filled-out tax return in your digital inbox (Altinn.no). All the fields are filled out from wages, bank accounts, charities etc., numbers which have been reported to the government. You don't need to do anything with the tax return unless you want to make changes or attach additional forms. If you do nothing at all, it will be automatically submitted.

In India also we get form from employer with information on tax paid in that financial year. You just need to copy paste the values to tax dept. website and submit. So simple.

I think that's optimizing the wrong thing; people should be aware of the amount they are paying in taxes.

In the UK each pay-as-you-earn taxpayer ( I.e. tax calculated automatically and deducted from net income ) receives an annual statement of their tax and figuratively how it was spent e.g. £800 on health, £105 on defence etc

Whereas in the US most people don't pay any attention to where their tax dollars go. Meanwhile, President Trump raised our already ludicrous defense budget another $50 billion.

We're still absolutely aware of how much we pay (it's on your payslip). There's just no end of year filing process.

Painfully aware one might say, given how insanely high they are.

They at least usually shield the daylight robbery GST from us. Probably so we can sleep at night.

As a Kiwi living in California at the moment, income taxes as a proportion of income are much higher here than in New Zealand. Effective NZ income taxes are way down the low end for the OECD, lower than the US, the UK, Australia, the list goes on. IIRC only Chile is lower, though I may not recall correctly.

GST is a pain, but no capital gains tax is also a big win for many (and many states in the US, including California, have one of those too.)

The UK does the same thing as NZ, no tax returns.

At the end of the tax year you get a P60 form that tells you how much tax you paid over the last year.

Instead of opting for the deductibles route, goods are subsidised at point of sale, so e.g. if you're buying solar panels, you don't need to cover the whole thing up front, or whatever financing deal you get, then claim money back in your tax return; instead the price you buy the panel at already has the subsidy baked in.

There is a slight difference between the UK and US, though, in that there is no per-state/county income taxes. Only UK wide. Individual counties use property tax to raise what revenues they need (counties are also responsible for a lot less things than States)

> There is a slight difference between the UK and US, though, in that there is no per-state/county income taxes. Only UK wide.

Not completely true. Scotland has for several years now had the power to set higher or lower income tax rates than the rest of the UK, but until this year they've never actually used that power. But now this year, Scottish income tax rates are actually being set slightly higher than the rest of the UK – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/02/middle-class-scot...

I agree. In fact, withholding should be done away entirely. Try taking money from people in a non-transparent way and see how well that goes.

It's amazing how quickly someone's feeling on taxation can flip once tax season means writing a check instead of getting a refund.

Of course, that's exactly why the system is set up the way it is; a number on a pay slip feels much less real than dollars that you have to fork over, so people hardly realize the extent to which the government is fleecing them.

I think people would freak out because many would forget to keep money aside to pay for taxes at the end of the year. If it were phased in or there was a large public education campaign to remind people to put money aside I bet there would be less anger.

Why?