Cash businesses and a lot of cheating on taxes/income reports.
I have some NYC-native friends whose parents make less than $20k a year on paper but own homes and generally live comfortably.
This is common in their immigrant community. On top of that, people rent apartments to each other cash only, pay with cash at restaurants or grocery store, etc.
I pay my taxes, not because I want to but because the state has right to licit first use of force and can throw me in jail if I don't. I personally have too much to lose so I comply. There's nothing moral about paying taxes because there is no consent involved. I'm not paying for things I'm using. I'm having money taken from me with no guarantee that I get something in return comensurate with how much is being taken from me with the threat of violence.
That being said, I'm not going to take exception with the people who are economically at the bottom and whose lives would be far worse if they didn't do what they can to avoid having their pockets picked by government. I wish my pockets weren't being picked but if someone else is able to avoid that fate, good for them.
It's far more moral for these people to keep the fruits of their own labor to make ends meet than for them to steal from other productive citizens trying to make a living, which is what we'd be forcing them to do if there was no way for them to avoid having their pockets picked by the government.
There is consent to taxation -- your parents consented for you on your behalf when they had guardianship over you as a child, by choosing to have your citizenship here. You implicitly maintained that by retaining your citizenship at the age of majority.
We probably agree in many ways on how badly tax money is spent, but that there is "nothing moral" about it is a statement that does not make sense.
It does to me. These are likely people that are living in lower quality housing with more people packed in per square foot of housing out of necessity. I don't have actually data to back up this assertion, but this has been my personal observation of folks that do the kind of informal work that allows them to be paid under the table.
There's some truth. My friend's parents don't live in desirable areas (to white collar workers) and in older housing. It is not rundown or anything, but it is an insular immigrant community. There's a reason almost none of their first generation kids stay in that area.
But they live comfortably — at least the people I talk to go on vacation often, were able to help my friend with student loans, have cars in NYC, etc.
I'm sure the GP would be happy if his tax dollars went to building roads and bridges, and not the thousand other things that are of dubious worth to the nation as a whole.
And I'm sure someone else would be happy if their tax dollars went to those things you dub of dubious worth. Picking and choosing where your tax dollars are spent is impractical.
I don't mind subsidizing it because I'm taking on significantly less risk by paying taxes, and these people aren't doing it out of some villainous intent, they're having a hard time getting by to the point that it's a worthwhile risk.
On the other end of the spectrum we have billionaires paying accountants and lawyers to exploit every tax loophole they can find. They don't even need to do it, they could easily just pay their taxes owed, but they choose not to.
> Must be fun to pay your taxes knowing that you are subsidising this BS.
I wouldn't be angry at working middle- or upper-middle-class people cheating the taxman in order to actually enjoy a decent living. I'd be angry at the politicians, large companies and ultra-high-net-worth individuals that are able to legally but unjustly cheat the taxman (and ultimately the taxpayer) or otherwise unjustly enrich themselves or their friends via lobbying, under-the-table money or favours thanks to having the right connections.
While true, it can still cause resentment if $subpopulation appears to be able to get away with "cheating" — scare quotes because it's not well-defined, and the resentment still happens even when the "cheating" is necessary to maintain existence rather than comfort, e.g. "Why do disabled single mothers get paid to look after their kids?" and "Why do we pay to house these people who fled a war and don't know if their families are still alive?" etc.
I don't have any solution here. Lots of resentful people claim to follow a specific dude that told rich people to pay their taxes, to give all their money to the poor, etc., and if a lifetime of religious practices don't persuade them what on earth can a random internet stranger like me do?
Some taxes are the price of civilization. I don't know how anyone can look at our current taxation scheme and how it is spent and make the argument that what we're subject to in the US is civilized. Just look at how much of taxes go to government largesse in Washington DC and bombing people that don't look like us abroad.
It's 2023. We have the technology to run more and more parts of the government in a way that we pay directly for the things we use so that each need currently met by government is forced to be more efficient if people saw how much they are paying for that. Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome. If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.
> If all government services moved to a fee based approach
This is essentially just privatizing everything. Just have all the kids pay for their own schooling. Eliminate Medicaid, kids can afford their own healthcare. All social safety nets would be eliminated, as if they require the people receiving the benefits to fund it then those programs would just never actually work.
> Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome.
Its not awesome when your neighbor decides to just no longer pay for trash service and starts piling up trash heaps right along your property line leading to extremely unsanitary conditions right next to your home. Or when your neighbors don't bother paying their fire department fees and that trash heap right next to your house starts burning but the department won't bother doing anything until its your house on fire.
I see this working by being forced to pay some $X (your taxes) but you can distribute that however you see fit. Another option could be packages such as "childless" where fewer of your taxes (but still some base amount) go to schools or "carless" where the bulk of your taxes go to local roads and mass transit rather than highways. I'd love to see this attempted on the municipal level. Especially in a city like my own, Toronto, where council loves to give yet more money to the police even though people are screaming for bike lanes or a home they can afford.
>If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.
And screw the poors while we are at it! Added bonus!
Ideally all children would get a good education, but I find it morally repugnant that unrelated person Y gets tossed in a cage if they don't fund person X's children.
your childhood was funded. or did your parents build the roads to the place where you were born? like it or not, a continuous society is a ponzi scheme of sorts. one which you benefitted from.
The funding of my childhood can be traced back capital investments and production in an old farming family, amongst other places.
The initial roads layout were likely put there by slaves. The capital growth needed to propel the family into generational wealth to fund our childhoods likely was fueled by slaves. We need to perpetuate slavery because muh roads were made possible by slaves and I benefitted.
Fortunately we can put the descendants of those slaves to work yet -- we'll call it 'property tax' and they still to this day work the fields, even if they're childless, to subsidize education of my farming family. If they don't pay it the sheriff just boots them out onto the street!
It's not slavery. It just happens to be that these descendents in rural America often have to work agricultural jobs to pay their property tax (a tax that in turn pays for my extended farming family's kids' educations). And if they don't pay those taxes they get booted onto the street. And if they get booted on the street they eventually get tossed in a cage (instantaneously if they resist the booting). And when they get tossed in a cage, the 13th amendment against slavery no longer applies them. You see, you can't make them slaves (again) unless they don't do their forced field work!
Fortunately at least we seem to have understood the fact I benefitted and got roads from it, doesn't mean it needs to be perpetuated.
Hopefully some of it will be caught by the IRS now that they're finally at least close to being adequately funded -- assuming the "conservatives" don't succeed in their fight against reduced deficits and tough-on-crime policies.
Hate it break it to you, but the funding for the IRS consistently fell through Obama's entire tenure and was at least 20% lower when he left office than when he started, including the years that dems controlled both house and senate. Conservatives suck but don't buy into the narrative that they're the only shitty people.
Obama is pretty dang conservative, but setting that aside, the funding for the IRS is set by Congress. I've seen no sign that the democrats reduced the IRS budget while they held power, but I'll admit I may have overlooked it.
In any case, today, there's only one party opposed to the recent funding increase, and it's the party that proudly claims to be the most anti-crime and anti-deficit folks in congress. Those are the facts today. This absolutely makes them the shittier people.
it exist everywhere, but larger cities have this problem largely because their taxation and regulation is exploitive forcing people out of the legal economy as a matter of self preservation.
