Poor People

[mrstickball]

trashleg said:

nordlead said:

No, I have never been in a public school ever, I was homeschooled. My parents paid taxes even though we never received a penny for it, and my kids will also be homeschooled. Hopefully my grandkids will be homeschooled since I think homeschooling is great. So that will be ~60 years of taxes just from me (or ~240k) that I never get a peny out of for any of my family in either direction.

Also, our taxes aren't like VAT. VAT is included in the sticker price. So if you buy a 20GBP item, then at the register it is 20GBP. If you buy a $20 item in the US then at the register it is $21.65. (tax varies by area) While most the time I don't care about the sales tax, sometimes you really have to sit down and figure out if you can afford it due to the taxes.

holy shit, i see now why you're so against it. o.0

homeschooling isn't all that common here, most people are state-schoolies. and that VAT thing must be confusing

thank you for taking the time to clarify everything, i really am ignorant of the US way of things.

I was also homeschooled my entire life. My family recieved $0 in compensation for doing this (despite median costs per student being $10,000/yr in Ohio). Because of this, my family saved taxpayers roughly $250,000 over the course of the education of my brother and myself.

Here are a few points of contention with tax paying and the benefits derived from it. It's not that some things are 'bad' but they are inefficient, and cost more than they should. I am only speaking from a US taxpayer standpoint, so please bear this in mind:

• Social Security. It is our federally-enforced pension system in the US. The only exemptions are for government workers and self-employed people. It's approximately an 8% tax levied on those with taxable income (eg, work for any business). The problem with this system is that the annual return of Social Security is beyond abhorrent: It accrues interest at 1.3% APY after adjustments for inflation. This is much lower than any private system available in the United States. Most private systems earn 4-5 times this amount. Remember those government workers I stated that were exempt? Most have infinitely better systems that the government offers them. For example, when I worked as a city employee of Ohio, I was exempt from Social Security. I contributed to OPERS (Ohio Public Employee Retirement System). It accrued interest at over 10% per year. It offered flexibility in how I could invest (I could diversify into whatever I wanted - with SS, you give them your money and they never report to you as what is going on with it), and many other options and benefits. Why should you be forced into an inferior system when there are better, more comprehensive systems out there?
• Schooling. A point we've just discussed. School taxes come from a variety of sources. Most are derived from property tax - many people pay a percentage of their houses' worth each year to support schools. This system taxes those that have houses and rewards those that do not. Furthermore, our US schooling system is abhorrent (please read our other threads about this). We're one of the worst in the industrialized world, yet we spend more money than almost any other country. There's almost no flexibility in the system - you are forced to go you your local public school in most cases. If your lucky, you can afford private school (which is cheaper than public schools in terms of financial burden - in Ohio, private schools cost half of public schools) or your parents can take the time for homeschooling. Either way, people are forced (which is fine) to pay for very bad, inflexible education. No one really would argue we should do away with mandatory taxes for schooling, but do we really need this kind of education at these insane prices?
• Healthcare. Despite what you've seen in the news, America has a federal healthcare system. It's called Medicare and Medicaid. Every American puts money into this, despite the fact that not everyone is eligible for it. It is far from universal, and targets the elderly and the poor. There's nothing wrong with wanting to help the poor. However, I've done some number crunching for Medicare: It costs roughly 80% more per enrollment than private healthcare in America. That means that for every 10 people enrolled in Medicare, you could have 18 on a private plan. Are we paying for efficency, or waste?
• National Defense. You know America. You know how much we spend. It's not outside of anyone's knowledge. Do we really need to spend $500 billion a year to defend other countries? I think not. A large amount of our defense costs are going toward protecting others in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even in friggin Europe. Who are we protecting in Europe? The French from another German invasion? We've hamstrung other countries like Japan from protecting themselves, and are exuasting our troops & finances for such things. Not a very good thing, no? How often do we see other countries and entities create such large defense networks? We shouldn't be doing this, yet we're taxing every American citizen roughly $1,500 a year for this cause.

And those are just parts of the American federal tax system. This doesn't include state or local projects. Most states and cities do a good job, but when they're handed federally, things can get out of control.

To see where American tax dollars go (the $3.2 trillion of 'em) check out this huge chart:

http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/5927/wallstatsdatlarge.jpg