It's just a theory, but I'm somewhat convinced that half the reason Americans hate taxes is because of how inconvenient and in your face they are in the US: IRS requires you to fill in a complex form with no help and punishes you if you get it wrong, and sales tax is not part of the advertised price of goods. I reckon if you got rid of that then people would care about taxes a lot less.

There are certain actors in the US political system who definitely believe the complexity/pain of filing is a feature, not a bug, as it leads people to associate taxes with pain instead of the benefits of living in a successful modern industrial democratic state.

Combine that with a tax prep lobby whose incentives are to sell you a solution.

The IRS could have made things as easy for most Americans as places like New Zealand did two decades ago.

Property tax payment is very easy in the US, because it is usually done as part of your regular mortgage payment - people still dislike paying it.

The IRS is also a lot more helpful than commonly advertised - I once had a several thousand dollar expense reimbursement from work that my employer wrongly classified a miscellaneous untaxed payment to me. They didn’t attach any penalties, just sent a letter essentially saying “we think you forgot to include this in your income for YEAR, we think you owe $X + $Y interest.”(and the interest amount was very reasonable, like 3-4%)

I just emailed them a copy of the receipts and email I had sent to my employer when claiming reimbursement, and noted that I had not claimed those expenses on my tax return, if I had done , then it would have exactly matched the tax owed.

They replied a few weeks later telling me thanks and that I owed nothing extra.

I do worry about arbitrary abuse of government power in the US, particularly against those guilty of WRONGTHINK, but my personal experience was exactly what I would hope for as a citizen, professional, clear and timely.

I still would still like taxes to be lower - but if you told me I had to make a mandatory charitable donation of the same amount every year to a real charity, I would be fine with that. So in my case at least, it’s that I expect the unionized middle class government workers to get most of the benefit of my extra tax, not the poorest people in society who need it most (and who are usually presented as the need for such increased taxes)

Absolutely, and it's set up this way on purpose by people who believe that filing taxes should be as painful and difficult as possible so people associate the idea of taxes with the artificially difficult process. It doesn't have to be this way, the rest of us are just held hostage by anti-tax zealots.

You seriously think that people want less taxes just because they are difficult to file?

Don't you think that paying 10-40 percentage points more (like in Europe) of your wage each month has something to do with it?

The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat. That makes the take home to be around 18k.

Sales tax is around 20% throughout Europe. That takes it from 18k to 16k.

Gas is double the price solely because of taxes

Property tax can increase the housing cost by 10%

Automobile property taxes are outrageous compared to the US. New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark (if the car costs 30k, pay 45k to the state), but are pretty high everywhere. In Romania, to register a 10 year old car with a 2.4 liter engine you have to pay 6000 euros. In a country with the average wage 1000 a month.

I find it so amusing that people think taxes are just an inconvenience.

By the way, if you want to pay more, you can just donate your money to charities: you have a higher impact than giving it to government, much better directed at what you care about, very easy to do. Donate 10-20% of your raw income to an ngo, then talk about doing that for everyone, compulsory.

From what I've read, US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs, you just get less for it. Property prices are the main thing that seems much worse in Europe, but that doesn't have anything to do with taxes.

Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.

> US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs

The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)

There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?most_... a more-expansive definition from the Fed raises this to 16% [a]

[a] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

There is no way German tax as part of GDP is just 11.5% Maybe just some subset of taxes

Overall it's 38%: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-germany.pdf

For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc

> The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020

This is incorrect (despite the citation).

Federal tax collection in 2020 was about 16% of GDP

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

The OECD reports "The tax-to-GDP ratio in the United States has decreased from 28.3% in 2000 to 24.5% in 2019."

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

For comparison, the weighted average in other OECD countries is about 34%.

> The typical educated European makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat.

Drivel.

Here in Norway (widely reputed to be heavily taxed) a single person earning 30 kUSD and having neither debts nor savings would pay 4752 USD in tax, about 15%. You would then pay up to 25% VAT on things you buy (less on food and rent).

See https://skattekalkulator2018.app.skatteetaten.no/?aar=2020&a...

> makes 30k a year. 40-45% in taxes right off the bat

Pretty much nowhere in Europe you're paying (effective) 40% on a 30k/yr salary. Nowhere. You're most likely not even reaching that tax level.

> New vehicle registration tax can reach 150% in Denmark

> Private cars: 25% of DKK 65,000, 85% of DKK 65,000-202,200 and 150% of the rest. https://skat.dk/skat.aspx?oid=2244599

So again you don't know how tax bands work (and Denmark is kinda of an exception)

> It's not "sales tax"

Sure, it's "VAT" - but it's essentially the same thing. You pay it for almost everything you buy. There are some lower rates for food in some places. But guess what, US has that too.

> Nowhere

Try this https://accace.com/payroll-calculator-romania/

Thanks for the link, but again you're taking the exception as the rule. Most countries don't work like that.

(it's also possible that social security is deductible before income tax is levied as per this site but I'm not looking too deeply into it: https://expatcenter.ro/tax-guide/ )

Romania also don't work like that, in principle. They are simply much poorer country than Norway. 30k EUR salary in Romania is upper middle class income, so it is heavily taxed. People making average wage pay much lower taxes.

Also, if I get the linked calculator right, then it expects you to put MONTHLY salary, in RONs, not EUR. So, just putting 30000 there you get a monthly salary of over 6000 EUR, or 72k per year. And that's taxed at 41%.

Romania is much poorer than Norway, but the tax is the same - it's a flat tax rate. Play with the calculator and you'll see. The numbers are in RON - which is 5 times smaller than the dollar, and the value is implied to be monthly - but it makes no difference because of the flat rate.

In other countries you might have tax brackets, but I know from experience that it's very easy to reach 45% total tax rate (not marginal).

e.g. try Belgium, at 100k the state gets 50% https://www.belgiumtaxcalculator.com/?salary=100000&average=...

Try UK. At 50k you pay "only" 26%, but then in the US you pay almost nothing, if you have a family with kids and use the deductions smartly.

True, Belgium is one of the highest.

> but then in the US you pay almost nothing

Well, not really. In NY that would be 27% (converted). And you pay 31% at $100k in NY (or 34% in 150k ) https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator

I'd like to see a citation for those income numbers, they're much lower than the figures from e.g. Eurostat:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Same principle as Cookie Banners. Wanting basic browsing privacy is being associated with an annoying, artificially difficult process.

> I reckon if you got rid of that then people would care about taxes a lot less.

Which is precisely why the party that is ideologically opposed to taxes will never let that happen.

Tax hate didn't really begin in it's current form till Reagan as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. When black Americans were excluded from the programs that taxes paid for, resistance was minimal.

I think you can go all the way back to the Boston Tea Party for tax hate.

The Boston Tea Party happened because the British got rid of a tax, I wouldn't call that tax hate. Some locals were ticked off because the British screwed up their smuggling operation.

That doesn't explain the difference between the opinions on taxes and it's change before and after the Civil Rights Act.

That's the point, every year you are aware of how much the government is taking from you. If citizens weren't aware of exactly how much taxes they paid they would be more inclined to want more tax increases

People should care about taxes a lot more. I want to know exactly how much money the government is taking from me by force. It's a good reminder that we need to be vigilant against uncontrolled government growth, and vote accordingly.

Americans hate taxes because we see little benefit from them. Federal taxes make up the brunt, and they mainly go to the military and corporate welfare. The biggest federal benefit is social security, and people don't see that until they retire. Even the benefits that do trickle back locally (eg highways, schools) are more of an end-run around state sovereignty rather than a respected benefit.

Local taxes mainly go to the domestic military and schools. You only see the main benefit if you have kids in public school.

State taxes are the most useful - large enough scale to accomplish things, but small enough scale to remain somewhat accountable. But since people can easily move between states, these become subject to intense politicking. For example, "Taxachusetts" even though its overall income tax rate is only 1.2x that of New Hampshire (32% vs 27%, for incomes $22k-$52k).

I'd personally love to see a flip of the magnitude of state and federal tax rates, money flowing between the two in the opposite direction, and a way for individuals to earmark what their tax money goes to. Some ability to steer taxes towards things they value would go a long way to making people feel enfranchised.

edit: lots of downvotes, but no counterpoints. While there are many things government does that I do value, I don't think their costs add up to anywhere near what is being paid in. What value do you feel you personally get from your taxes, apart from longing for some sort of social contract?

Is that really the general consensus? If anything, so much of taxation goes to waste on bureaucracy and inane or downright criminal nonsense in the US. I live in Canada, and I basically consider it to be theft that my taxes that are taken from me forcefully go to places such as giant corporations, and military applications that I do not want to happen.

OTOH, I think that taxation is important, and I'm happy that my taxes go to health services, something that Canada does relatively well, even though I don't necessarily benefit in the same way compared to people less fortunate than I am. Same for social services, for example.

My point is that I don't think such feelings can be boiled down to "my money is going to people who don't deserve it". It's a complex topic and complex feelings which should be treated as such

It, in fact, is their money. There was a time in American history when income taxes were not a thing and still we got along.

It’s not a bad thing to pool money for common causes, but to claim it isn’t their or our money is kind of odd.

It's your money like it's your water and your oxygen. Build some big tanks on your "property" and put machine gun nests around it to defend it.

Everything in modern society is part of a social contract that includes thousands of people working to keep it from devolving into anarchist chaos of violence and subjugation.

That's understood.

But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.

We can "choose to include them" until we discover that it is unviable to fund the necessary services and find out society is completely dysfunctional without them.

As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.

I'm not against taxes. There are things that can only be executed as a group.

What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.

It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.

We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.

I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.

>What I am against is the notion that it's not mine.

Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?

The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.

I don't think any reasonable philosophy of taxes tries to claim that your money "belongs to the government" and "they let you keep some".

We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.

It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.

I was responding to:

"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".

I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.

It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.

If you don't have enough to pay your taxes, then you're in a very unusual position, because the average American gets their taxes withheld from their paycheck regularly. It must mean that you own your own business, or are doing something fairly unusual, and have failed to properly budget with taxes in mind. No one "doesn't have enough to pay taxes" just because they don't make enough money, because income tax is progressive specifically to avoid that type of problem.

As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.

It's only their money because the economic system assigns it to them. If the economic system was different then it wouldn't be theirs.

That's like saying it's only their house because we allow them to own a house. Or, those are their children because we allow them to keep their children and not assign them to the state.

It's as if in lawless lands with tribal warfare suddenly people don't earn a living.

yes true. property, especially real estate, is a legal construct created by the state. In older eras this was more explicit, property existed “at the pleasure of the Queen” or whatever. Now we rely on a nebulous social consensus reinforced by the courts and legislature.

Money is only a token within this game - it has no reality other than the rules. The rules are whatever society decides they are. There is not a “real” ownership that the rules are interfering with.

But that's true for any rights. The right to feel safe, the right to safety and not be harmed, raped or killed. Without society, sure, real-estate, personal safety are out the window and we could expect expropriation, rape and death.

In the US property is also governed by ones rights to defend your property. We have castle doctrine for a reason

You have "Castle doctrine" because it was deemed politically beneficial to a politician at some point. That same politician that would happily turn your neighborhood into a strip mall through eminent domain if that was beneficial for them. You have banks literally foreclosing on the wrong homes, or through simple errors, making people homeless in the process, and those same politicians are "so sad".

If you're in a Western nation and you "make" money, it is very much a partnership with the state, and your ability to "make" money would very likely disappear without the state. For someone to go on about "their" money has no correlation with actual reality, and I'd encourage them to ply their trade in Somalia. I'm sure the income tax rates are great.

This is kind of circular reasoning. You might as well say you are only alive because the state lets you live.

It's my life as much as money is my money. Yes, they can be taken away.

yes, there is always the option to return to violence, for anyone who’d prefer to be nasty, brutish, and short.

Children are a bit different because they are actually created by the parents (and the personal relationship is of course super-important for the child's development).

But generic economic resources: yes. Ownership of pretty much anything including houses relies on social acceptance of the rules of private property ownership and market value. And that social acceptance can be conditional on things like taxes to fund social goods. If you don't want to play by the democratically determined rules, then you shouldn't expect the state to defend your property.

I think that property-children is on a continuum. When you have raiding parties and tribal warfare, children were taken as slaves. From that PoV then children are in the same basket where they are protected by the norms of society, same as property.

Saying you only own your money or house because we allow you to is like saying the only reason you don't get raped or killed is because we have a structure of laws against it. Yes?

The first US income tax was in 1861, I find it hard to believe "we got along" when we held a significant portion of the population as literal slaves.

That's very true for the south. Yet, the north still got on and did even better than the south.

Never the less, you can go to any other place which didn't have slaves and they still got on without income taxes.

And, if you go to parts of the middle east where slavery exists today, income taxes have not prevented it, so it's beside the point.

Maybe a lot of people are struggling to get by? "Their money" represents the ability to pay for food and housing so I'm not sure it's only about wanting others to suffer, as you imply. I think it's at least partially about their own sense of security.

A government that provides nothing to support feelings of security in exchange for the taxes they collect is... not a good government.

>the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.

I'm also pretty miffed at how much money has been wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The federal government gives heaps of money to other nations to spend on frivolous projects while our own infrastructure decays. My frustration at taxes and spending goes beyond the trope of Americans not liking the idea of giving money to the poor.

Foreign aid is tiny, like less than one percent of the budget. Foreign wars are definitely huge, however.

I want to clarify that I am okay with foreign aid and disaster relief. The "foreign aid" that acts like soft bribes are the kind I really detest.