>Individuals shouldn't see tax. That way the voters don't complain when you need to put it up.

If taxation is such an inherent good then why does it need to be hidden from people?

If the rate is justifiable the government shouldn't need to hide it. When you consider a democratic society where the government at least indirectly serves the will of the people the idea of the government needing to pull a fast one on the people or obfuscate its actions lest the people tell them to stop becomes even more absurd.

> If taxation is such an inherent good then why does it need to be hidden from people?

Because the externalities are not always visible, and people do not have enough free bandwidth to spend the time understanding them.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe it is the role of the person being paid to justify the expense. If you get hand wavy and tell me its too complicated I'm just going to presume you are stealing from me.

The Government is not "being paid" tax dollars[^0], it is (in principle, at least) spending and redistributing wealth in ways which benefit all citizens. UKGov releases these reports, for example https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-statistic... - good luck condensing these down to the point where they can fit in any taxpayer's head, and this is just the surface level outgoings.

> If you get hand wavy and tell me its too complicated [...]

Unfortunately, it really is too complicated. A doctorate in economics might get you a decent way towards understanding the good that taxation provides, but given that economists still have differences of opinion, maybe not a complete understanding.

[^0]: Well it is, but only a tiny proportion.

What exactly is your background where you assume your answer is correct when you know even the experts have substantial disagreements on taxation. Maybe there are a lot of legitimate disagreements on how much and which taxes because taxes aren’t a universal good but rather a necessary evil.

What claims do you think I have made? All I have said above is that taxation (a) is complicated and (b) has hidden externalities, both of which are obviously correct and appropriate responses to the things being asked.

" A doctorate in economics might get you a decent way towards understanding the good that taxation provides"

Unlikely. Economics doesn't even understand how the monetary system works, let alone taxation.

Taxation works more like memory garbage collection than anything else. It's a cleaning up process.

"If taxation is such an inherent good then why does it need to be hidden from people?"

It isn't an inherent good. It's just required to reduce demand and release people so the public sector can purchase them with its money.

Without it you would have inflation - or none of the public services we voted for.

The reason you pay tax is that your income is higher than it otherwise would have been without the government spending.

What people who don't like tax forget is that should you eliminate it, the increased income will be eliminated too. But not in a smooth way. Jobs will be decimated, and one of those might be yours.

To invert that: if people understood how much the services being provided to them cost they would not consume them.

The goal of government shouldn't be to obscure the cost of government services. The cost should be justified.

> To invert that: if people understood how much the services being provided to them cost they would not consume them.

I don't think that's true. I think what is true, and what we've seen time and time again, is that people don't like the cost of services that others take advantage of that they don't need to.

That puts the cart before the horse. People voted for them, so they are provided - and the people required to run them removed from the private sector.

To invert that, what exactly are you planning on doing with the people currently in the public service, which the people voted for, that is so much more important than providing the services the people voted for?

It is for the private sector to justify its use of resources, not the public sector. The public sector has a democratic mandate.

I strongly disagree with that idea. Voters must know exactly how much they are paying for something for them to care about efficiency of government spendings. What you are proposing is how things currently work in Russia and trust me you don't want that

People not knowing their tax burden: feature or bug?

I think paying your state and federal taxes in the United States should be seamless. Your employer should take the taxes out of your paycheck. At the end of the month/year, you should get a statement showing all the taxes you paid.

I recently had to update my W4 form at work for tax withholding, and what a pain in the ass to read and decipher. Add to that, and I had to do the same thing for my state taxes.

I want to point out that Congress has shot down the idea of making it easier to pay your taxes many times. I'm not sure if it is Intuit or some other entity, but paying your taxes should be easy. If you don't like the level of taxation, then work to reduce them, but paying them should be easy.

Do most Americans have to do their own taxes?

It boggles my mind that this is the case.

They do.

The UK PAYE (Pay as You Earn) system has a 1% tax gap[1] compared to 12.9% on income tax and 7% on corporation tax.

It's extraordinarily more efficient to tax at source.

[1]The percentage tax gap is the tax gap pound value as a proportion of theoretical liability, where theoretical liability is defined as the tax gap plus the amount of tax actually received.

The original purpose wasn’t to hide taxation but to effectively get more money via interest by the government getting paid sooner.

As I understand it in the US, the average taxpayer’s experience is that of annual taxes but the reality is that taxes are paid quarterly and settled on an annual basis. The self employed see this more clearly. Those in employer-employee relationships don’t see it since the employer sends the quarterly check to the various income taxing jurisdictions. Any interest made from the temporary storage of cash is probably more favorable to the employer than the government since the government spends cash faster than it arrives. The government does not escrow tax remittances in an interest generating account and then withdraw it all at year’s end.

Historically individual taxes were annual while some business taxes were quarterly. In Canada, corporate income tax is annual but sales tax remittances are quarterly. The interest is favourable to government since it reduces the amount of debt it needs to carry for a time. Admittedly it’s small now but in the 80’s it was a very big deal. I admittedly have never ran payroll taxes for a business in the US so I don’t know how that in particular works. I do however know Milton Friedman came up with the idea of withholding while working for the government early in his career and he always claimed that it was motivated by interest.