I suspect this isn't only averseness to taxation. Loss aversion is a well known human behavior, and when you have to write out a huge check to the government at the end of the year instead of having it taken out of your paycheck automatically, I could def see this kicking in pretty strongly.

Maybe we are not doing a good enough job of promoting civic duty, including payment of taxes? After all those taxes are used mostly for Medicare, Medicaid and the Military, all of which seem like worthy causes to pay for right? Not including State and Local taxes used for more immediate local functions, of course.

Personally I'm fine with Medicare and Medicaid but what I'm not so convinced is worthy is an endless series of overseas wars, 4000 U.S. bases, 800 more bases in 80 countries, $1.4 trillion for F-35s of controversial effectiveness, another trillion for nuclear weapon modernization, and several more trillion that's unaccounted for because the Pentagon has never been audited.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-is-defen...

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentag...

I lean liberal but a significant portion of my family is conservative.

Their thinking with regards to taxes is that it's spent on one of the following:

- Welfare, which is supposedly rampant with fraud to the point that most people who are on welfare don't "need" it

- Unspecified government waste

Not that these don't exist- it's just that it's the majority of government spending, according to them.

If taxes are cut, they claim welfare will get cut, forcing people to find work, and that government will somehow cut their other wasteful spending while still managing to fund the necessities.

I live in suburban NJ, so it's a bit easier for me to see where my taxes go- police, fire, public transit, a handful of schools. But in rural America, where 911 response times can be around 30 minutes, there's no train to get to a nearby city, and there's only two schools in your town? It looks like that money vanished.

Welfare is welfare but then we're calling welfare welfare. The F35, on the other hand, is another form of welfare except that it's patriotic welfare.

Do they know that 20 billion goes to farm subsidies? I would guess that they don't mind that type of welfare.

> Maybe we are not doing a good enough job of promoting civic duty, including payment of taxes?

If you're a strict old-school limited govt jeffersonian type, as many farmers are, fighting income taxes and avoiding paying into federally mandated systems is your civic duty..

not saying I agree with either side - but pointing out that notions of 'civic duty' are not so cut-and-dried

>all of which seem like worthy causes to pay for right

Just because something is worth doing does not mean you can throw money at it with no regard to efficiency.

Tractors are not cars. While they do loose value by not being "new", the ratio is MUCH smaller than for cars.

They have an hour meter for a reason. This is really what people use to tell if it is new.

Of course, but then you've now got $30,000 in depreciation toward next year's taxes!

Farmers often take 100% depreciation on a new purchase. So for tax purposes they lost 150k and do not have an asset worth 150k sitting around.

Now if they sell the tractor they have to pay taxes on the full sale price as profit since it was previously worth zero.

Which, because of their mindset about taxes, hurts the resale market for tractors and allows manufacturers to overprice new sales.