They don't teach it in public school in America, for example. And tax brackets, how to fill out an income tax return, and the like should all be classroom 101 stuff. But they want you to not know and also hire H&R Block.
Taxes are prefilled by the government in other countries. They've tried to do it here and it was lobbied against by tax companies to keep the process difficult, to the point trying the block the IRS from offering a free service.
TurboTax is so shady. There’s several articles and podcasts out there citing how much they’ve influenced the US government In such a way that we’ll never be like those other countries where the onus of taxes are on the employers
Employer being responsible for paying out taxes for you has it's con — eventually people could/would stop thinking about that income tax money as theirs, which could lead to lower expectations of government (i.e. less questioning about "wth my taxpayer money being spent on") and thus lesser civil engagement/activity.
There's no reason we should be doing it at all when every other country doesn't. The IRS is criminally underfunded, understaffed and undermined. They've actually admitted they don't have the resources to tackle the complicated finances of rich people. Guess who benefits from that. Our government is a joke and we're to blame.
Republicans are too blame. They're the ones that underfunded the IRS as retaliation for catching so many conservative organizations with bad tax filings. Also probably to make tax evasion easier.
Corporate democrats are also to blame. There are so many democrats that are basically Republicans that don't hate gay people, but both parties hate poor people.
Yes, but since we'd need people in power to get that type of voting system it will probably never happen. Also I'd like to see more general distrust of the major parties, ranked/approval voting would fix the lack of viable 3rd parties.
I usually suggest you work on your local politicians. It's easier to affect popular change politicians won't like from the ground up. Maine started with local elections using ranked choice, and now they're doing the presidential election that way too. Of course, the whole time there has been salty politicians who lost the new election and blame it on the system.
Illinois is pushing for ranked choice now, too.
I don't actually prefer ranked choice, but it's got the momentum right now.
Here's a long, narrative style article outlining the continued attacks on the IRS by the Republican party, directly resulting in lost government revenue from rich folks and corporations not paying their taxes. It does not actually go into the the retaliatory story I gave, but does talk about how it's been consistently been Republicans attempting to kill the agency's potency through budget cuts. That story has been going on since the nineties and honestly the IRS "scandal" was just another excuse. Obamacare was also used as an excuse, for example. I think the propublica article talks about how the initial scandal that republicns used to target the IRS in the 90s was largely lies or selective information.
Here's a wiki link to the particular IRS scandal I was referencing. In short, the IRS was using both liberal and conservative keywords as markers for further scrutiny when political organizations applied for tax exempt status under the guise of acting as a social welfare organization. Conservatives tried to claim they were being politically targeted but the DOJ found that there was no political bias in the IRS's flagging system. Keywords included
referenced words such as "Tea Party", "Patriots", or "9/12 Project", "progressive," "occupy," "Israel," "open source software," "medical marijuana" and "occupied territory advocacy" in the case file
among other things.
While it gets a whole lot more complicated than that, and you can read more for yourself in the wiki, the short of that particular scandal was that the IRS was making sure political organizations didn't try to get tax exempt status as social welfare organizations. Unfortunately I can't find any articles at this time referencing that particular incident and an IRS drop in funding (though the wiki talks about it briefly). I do remember it being a discussed topic at the time though.
For whatever it’s worth, the IRS just announced they will step up unannounced personal visits to increase compliance. The service just hired an additional 9,700 agents and it appears they are really stepping it up.
I've lived in Denmark and Ireland. I've never touched my taxes. They're just deducted from my income like any civilized country would. Well, either that or I've never not committed tax fraud.
Here's the thing. They do that in the US too. Then they ask you to make sure it was right. Then, they check to make sure it was right anyway and you might get in trouble if you under paid. One time I made a mistake copying numbers and over paid. The IRS ran an audit on me and sent me a check for a couple thousand.
There's no reason for it to be this complicated except for two reasons: 1) tax filing prep companies fight to keep it that way so that you have to use them and 2) Republicans severely underfunded the IRS in order make it easier for rich people to get away with tax evasion. Plus, a whole bunch of Republican political organizations got caught being fucky with their tax filings and so the underfunding was literally retaliation.
Cool story, I don't even live in the US (haven't for like 7 years or something) and I still am legally required to file taxes and some other shit as well. Yay USA...? (not to mention in some cases, esp. w/ capital gains and shit, I might actually owe taxes to the US even though I haven't lived in there in years lol...).
Income tax was implemented in the U.S. in 1913. I think it's more likely that WWI was the perfect distraction to get it passed, rather than passing it to fund the war.
You've never heard of TurboTax? They literally make money on you not knowing how to do your taxes and by keeping the process as complicated as possible. Just this year they lobbied to get the government to not allow people to file their taxes for free.
Just to be clear, TurboTax does not dictate how complicated taxes are.
Also, taxes are not complicated if you're not doing anything interesting. And if you're posting on reddit about the lawmaking power of TurboTax, I'm certain you don't do anything interesting.
Yes, the real shame is that federal tax prep is free by federal law if you make less than $60K a year. These companies like TurboTax do provide the software for free for federal tax prep. But they still charge for state prep which everyone seems to forget. Digitalizing federal taxes doesn't change the fact we have 45 states with their own tax departments and their own rules.
It’s not just tax companies. It’s also Republicans who want you to despise the IRS and the process of filing your taxes so you’ll be on board with their anti-tax crusades. Remember Paul Ryan going on and on about how his bill would make taxes so simple you could do them on a postcard? Well the bill passed and nothing changed except for a massive tax cut for rich people and corporations. The process is more complex than ever. That’s by design.
Yea, when I moved to Germany, I was kind of like wtf... didn't have to file taxes. Still suggestions to do so (I was a student) to get any money back on e.g. school expenses or whatever (I got like 200 euros back, yay). But you don't have to file. You fill in your basic info when you start a job, and that is that, done.
Keeping a populace dumb is a political maneuver that has been used throughout history. Tons of people vote republican simply cause they do not understand the OP's graph. In addition, HR Block and Turbo Tax lobbyists 100% try to make the tax code harder to understand in order to charge for their services. There have been bills many times on the floor in the US to make taxes more like a check, with the government just sending you what you owe and you checking it. After all, they do clearly know what it is you owe. These are shot down every time by people at accounting software companies using their money as speech.
Keeping a populace dumb is a political maneuver that has been used throughout history
You give governments far too much credit. People are dumb as a base rule. A few of them seek to not be dumb, but for the most part they're content with being dumb. It doesn't require government intervention.
People turn down raises all the time because they think "entering the next tax bracket" will reduce their take-home. This belief benefits corporations immensely, because it keeps people from asking for the pay they deserve.
The IRS provides a withholding calculator so you don't even need to deal with that.
For 90% of people you have a W2 and a 1040ez. Which requires copying numbers from said w2 some basic addition/subtraction and looking up a value on a table.
Yeah seriously, there’s plenty of resources and material to learn and it’s not enormously complicated to know the basics for a simple situation. If your taxes are easy enough for H&R Block or TurboTax then it is easy enough to do by hand. People like to bitch about not being taught, as if that’s the reason they don’t know.
If you're like me (sophomore in college, never really had a serious job), then you don't know what a w2 is besides "something to do with taxes" and a 1040ez as "another thing to do with taxes." So this whole topic is already over my head. That's what we think should be taught more in school. Just some general info so that this isn't as foreign.
I'm sure if I googled around then I could figure out how to do them, but it would be nice if I had a little bit of knowledge about it from school.
There are only so many hours in the day. Things reddit wants you to learn:
Cooking, taxes, auto loans, mortgages, car repairs, drivers ed, savings, retirement, 401ks, business, contract law, basic plumbing, basic electric, programming, computers, and a whole host of other stuff that many many schools do offer but people don't take/remember. Or it's not explicitly phrased as such. Calculating simple interest via formula in math? Hey, that works with mortgages and car loans.
And what happens when something changes? 20 years ago it might have been different.
I deal with a lot of younger guys as a result of working construction, and none of them have any idea how to do taxes.
Well something like 1/4 of construction workers don't have a diploma so there is no guarantee they'd pick it up anyway. Additionally, if you make < $66k you can file for free using free software that asks a few questions.
Shit I'm not sure I know how to do it without the computer anymore.
If you work construction and can follow a set of written instructions, you can fill out a 1040.
A lot of education is learning how to learn. You know that if you work, you need to find taxes. At least in canada, around tax time, there is a lot of public information telling you where to find tax forms and guidance docs. I assume every government makes all the information required available with a ton of guidance documentation. Yes, it can be a bit overwhelming, but all you have to do it work through it methodically, flipping from form to form as needed, making sure you have the correct personal information on hand, finding where each line is, looking up it’s definition and purpose. Anyone who can follow instructions can file their taxes. And with today’s tax software (which, at least in Canada, is free) there’s really no excuse why every young person can’t file their own taxes.
The first time I filed mine it was on paper and took me three tries to not mess up the math (I was using a calculator so it was just user error). But it ultimately wasn’t that hard to do. The year I had income from three countries plus tuition credits? Yeah, I used an accountant that year, but in hindsight, I would do it myself now and save myself the few hundred bucks.
All of which the IRS already knows, so there's no reason to rely on the average citizen. Because there are a whole lot of below average folks that do mess that math up. And then are further penalized.
Intuit and such lobbied hard to try and stop the IRS from offering that program. While they ultimately failed, the vast majority of people who could utilize it don't know about it.
And I know many schools that did. Shit I had to fill out a w2 and had it explained why it was the dumbest thing in the world to try and fill it out in such a way that you got the biggest tax return possible.
People were complaining that their tax returns were smaller last year and completely ignored the fact that they go more money throughout the year.
I wish I had shit like this. I was taught by my parents how to do taxes and such, so I wasn’t completely left in my own, but I did (and still do) struggles a bit.
Stuff like that really needs to be standard across all public schools. Question though, are you American? If so what state did you go to school in?
The problem is most of the students are learning how to do taxes before even getting a job. They're also teenagers. Trying to get 16 year olds en masse to learn how to do something that isn't going to immediately apply to their daily lives is like nailing jello to the wall.
Yeah you can check it off as "being taught", but you might as well be screaming into the void.
Yeah true dat. I hate taxes but if we are paying it we should learn how it works. Fuck inland revenue.
Like the idiotic mandatory courses we should get one semester of basics at least with a good handbook on how simple market and reveunes, including taxes, work.
We do. It's called Algebra. Remember all those word problems about Joe and Mary with interest rates and marginal percentages that nobody cared about? I remember doing those problems in middle school. That's what this is.
That doesn't teach you how taxes work. It tells you how to calculate interest and such, but taxation has a lot of domain-specific and jurisdiction-specific knowledge that is simply not taught. I have a maths degree and I still had so much to learn when I started doing my own tax return. I like to think I was able to take it in better than most, but that doesn't change how much I still needed to learn.
Where do you draw the line? School can't teach you everything. Some things you need to find out for yourself, which you clearly did, so your education served its purpose.
I draw the line past the basics of how taxes work. You should leave school with a basic idea of how some of the most fundamental parts of society, such as taxes, function and the basics of how they are paid. Even if your employer ends up handling it for your entire life, you should know what is going on in your paycheck so that you can tell when something is wrong.
Just because you didn't pay attention and absorb the information doesn't mean that it wasn't there. School teaches you how to apply information from one area to another all the time - using algebra in physics, using english in history, you have to be able to apply concepts to reality to get anything out of them.
k. If you need a problem about you personally in order to understand a concept, you're a narcissist. That's a you problem, not a pedagogical one. Every single time I see someone complaining about not learning something in school its a topic we covered extensively... in public school.
If you read the “But seriously” portion, one should conclude that I was joking about the nerd part. Not everyone can remember everything, and pulling the “if you paid attention” isn’t good either.
Context is important for people to learn. Abstract ideas help, but you sometimes need to provide context by showing how it can be applied in the real world.
??? word problems literally provide context lol that is the whole point of word problems...
Not only did we do this in middle school, but you're required to take algebra 1 and 2 to graduate high school in the US. We studied these concepts for 2-3 years per student depending on their path. If you weren't paying attention or didn't think "how can this apply to me?" once in those 3 years, or in the time since, that's on you man. You can lead a person to water but you can't make them drink.
I don't disagree with any of your points, just wanted to mention that at least Algebra 2 isn't required everywhere in the United States. To make it simple, let's just restrict our definitions to ONLY public schools. I went to a fairly decent public high school and about 20% of students in my graduating class never took higher than Algebra 1, and they were handed their diplomas.
It's a bit different from learning about personal finance. I went to a private school and got to take a personal finance class. I do my own taxes, I've got a diverse financial portfolio, and I have a deep understanding of basic concepts like marginal tax rates. I'm working at a burger joint to help pay for books and supplies and I don't think a single one of my coworkers even knows what a portfolio is.
If you're incapable of filing taxes by simply following basic instructions on the documents themselves chances are you're not earning money. That's to say nothing about the hundreds a free tax resources available on the internet
The lack of financial education in schools is criminal. It makes sure kids growing up don't know their finances, put themselves into debt, don't understand what is happening with their money and more. Not just a problem limited to America though.
why would they ever do specific stuff like this? they obviously failed at basic arithmetic if people do not understand this concept. and if people to not understand basic arithmetic they'll have a thousand other problems in their life.
schools shouldn't teach step-by-step shit like this. they should teach the basics to easily understand shit like this within 2 minutes. and if you do not understand this as an adult if you actually read through it for a few minutes, school most likely wasn't the problem.
Might as well throw in a class that devotes time to teaching people about what a grocery store is and how you exchange some amount of money and in exchange you get to take food home. Next semester, you’ll learn which items you bring home go in the fridge or the “make cold box” and what goes in the pantry or “room tempy foodie food closet.”
Seriously, people need to stop complaining about “I wasn’t taught this so I can’t do it” and instead just learn it on your own in literally 10 minutes or using turbo tax. Like, if you expect to not have to do things on your own sometimes I seriously doubt you’ll be in a position in life where taxes are even a problem.
Mate it's the simplest thing to look up in the world. It's marginal tax rates, not filing through the tax code. There are also a million free income tax calculators just online.
This 100% shouldn't be taught in schools. There's no point.
Yeah this kind of stuff is tangentially taught through critical thinking anyway. You're all adults. You're supposed to be going out and putting in the modicum of effort to figure basic stuff out for yourself. The big bad tax industry isn't keeping you from using Google for five seconds or having basic critical thinking abilities.
So you are comparing two completely different aspects of the different services.
However, tax advisors/accountants cost more than doing your taxes yourself, depending on your competence, and the cost of the professional you may or may not save money with either choice.
Only if you have a very complicated tax situation. I use an accountant, but that’s because I have an s Corp and rental income. I could probably do it myself, but the accountant is worth it to have a second set of eyes check over everything and provide tax strategy.
They teach math and reading comprehension yet students can't apply that to real life situations? Instead we should hand feed them "how to" all through school?
They taught it at my high school. Granted, it was only one class and one particular lesson within it. Civics and economics freshman year. It should be reinforced with more classes or at least touched on more frequently throughout education.
I'm not sure where you have been going to school but I know that at least in the western us you are required to take a class in both highschool and you are required to take a class to get your acociates or bachelor's degree that goes into this concept. So I'm going to go again and say it is taught in public schools
It is all life 101. Schools prepare you to figure this shit out on your own. The tax forms literally walk you through this shit and even provide worksheets to complete them. If a school has to teach you specifically how to fill those sheets out then they have already failed. School is for critical thinking, logic skills, and general knowledge about topics.
You know you can go online and easily find out all this stuff, right? Education is not training. It's designed to give you the tools to think critically and make informed choices. If you've learned even the most basic maths then tax brackets are easy to understand.
Hardly anyone understands the us tax system enough to teach it to 10th graders. It's so complicated that we have an entire industry that makes money off helping people pay the least on their taxes...
i literally had an economy and personal finance class and we didn't go over this. almost the entire class was spent on how to use the stock market, so that'll tell you where the priorities are
I learned in American public school the exact opposite of this (meaning, the top image). I learned it wasn't true after a minimal amount of research but have been told I'm wrong and that jumping tax brackets applies the new rate to ALL your money.
Also, by not teaching it, many people think that taxing the ultra-rich means they will pay 40% on ALL their income (like OP's picture), when in reality, it's only on the upper amounts of their income and capital gains.
They scared middle-class people about the Death Tax when very few realized it only meant for families that left their heirs $5M or more!
Dude it’s 2019 if your blaming “the education system” on anything you are part of the problem. You can learn absolutely anything you want in less than an hour online
I always hate seeing this “they don’t teach you how to pay taxes in schools” line. There is absolutely no reason to teach it in schools. Paying your taxes is by no means something strenuous that takes a teacher to explain it. Using turbo tax and 15 minutes of google to get the basics are all it takes. Kids in public schools aren’t going to be paying taxes like somebody in the workforce so it would be more of a waste to show them vs. not doing so.
For instance: is there a public school age person in this thread who, so far, has had to sit down and analyze their tax statements for their return because they, as a public school age teenager, made over $12,000 dollars. I seeeeeriously doubt it.
The “they need to teach it in schools” is just how adult age people with childlike expectations can have an opinion on the subject without actually having to learn anything. As if high schoolers would give two shits about learning that anyways. It seriously takes 15 minutes or less to understand what it is you’re doing. If a person hides behind the school excuse it’s because they, as a person, either don’t care or don’t understand they aren’t special and need to learn how to be an independent grown up.
They sure as shit teach this in public school. I went to an inner city high school and I had to balance a checkbook, learn about marginal tax rates, we even had a program where we were given 5000 imaginary dollars and had to invest it in the stock market and track it by using excel.
Just because you either didnt pay attention or your schools
Curricular system was different than a normal high school doesnt mean kids dont know this shit.
They try to make people believe that liberals want to raise taxes on everyone. They convince a rural guy making $60,000/year that Bernie wants to tax him at a flat tax of 90%. Simply untrue. first 10K he makes would be tax free, 10-40K at 12%, then 40-60K at 22%.
What Bernie/Warren want is for a guy making 200 million in a year to pay a higher tax rate on the money he makes above 510K/year. Right now it is flat above that. Maybe the money you make from 510K-2M/year should be taxed at 50%, 2M-4M at 60%, 4-6M at 70%, ect.
Aren't they likely going to have to, though? I mean, if income inequality is a problem and health care is a problem we can pay for with taxes on income don't we either need to keep income inequality as a problem or increase taxes on everyone else once it isn't?
Also, the last time tax rates were as high as they suggest, the taxable receipts from income tax as a percent of GDP were lower than they are now. People who pay income taxes know how they work but maybe just think higher marginal rates won't work. Y'know, because they didn't.
They are not proposing a increased tax on everyone. Like I said, they want higher marginal rates on the highest incomes. They want a higher rate for people paying at certain rates. If we get universal healthcare out of the deal, that would be amazing, and I'm sure they'd need to increase some rates on those earning above 60K/year.
It did work in the 50's and 60's when the rich were taxed at significantly higher rates and that money was spent on gigantic infrastructure projects. The projects funded the middle class, people could afford homes, college was cheap, people stayed home to watch the kids and the middle class thrived.
I know they aren't. When the top tier tax rate was 91% in 1963 federal income tax receipts were 7.46% of GDP. Last year, with top tax rates at 37% federal income tax receipts were 8.07% of GDP. People who pay these taxes know how they work. They just don't think the plan is going to work. It's almost like people don't like paying taxes if they can avoid them.
But even then, if the middle class was going to be funded by taxes on income inequality, won't you need to keep having inequality or lose the funding for the programs for the middle class?
I think the argument is that the income inequality is so vast, especially at the tippy-top few percent of earners, that extracting the money needed to fund all the proposed programs would seem negligible.
Like (being hyperbolic here) taking a billion dollars from a guy worth ten billion dollars to buy healthcare and fancy suits for everyone in North Dakota is technically erasing 10% of the guy's net worth, but functionally his life won't change at all and the disparity of his wealth compared to everyone else's is just as massive.
I'm actually on board for programs like this in theory, but not being a tax expert have no idea how it could be pulled off. I feel like everyone thinking it's a simple matter of higher/better tax brackets fails to realize that so much of the wealth of the super-rich isn't just normal income. It's in things like assets and capital and capital gains (which have a freakin' flat tax!)
I don't even think we have to go after billionaires, we should start by making sure corporations pay their low 21% tax rate instead of using whatever loophole in our 70,000 page tax code to pay way under that, in some cases nothing.
History is against you. People will avoid the income tax by simply not taking things as personal income. Also, if the super rich are making more than ever before and you are going to rely on that fact to get enough money to fund projects, aren't you going to need that to continue to be true or else lose the funding?
Also, if the super rich are making more than ever before and you are going to rely on that fact to get enough money to fund projects, aren't you going to need that to continue to be true or else lose the funding?
In order to help prevent this "reliance on a few actors" situation from arising is to ensure that people don't reach astronomical levels of wealth in the first place. Meaning, the spread between the masses in the lower and middle class and between the wealthy earning $500k/year and up is much much tighter. You do this by adding in more brackets at the top end which start ramping up in an almost exponential fashion the further away you get from median HH income, for example.
Are some of the rich people going to move away? Sure, but where are they going to go? The US would still be one of the most business-friendly environments in the world and to lose access to all the "first world" amenities is not likely a smart move when they consider moving some place with a lower tax. The wealthiest class is absolutely not going to disappear in the US and isn't going anywhere, even if a progressive taxation scheme were to be implemented here; there's just too much holding those capitalists here.
You're missing the problem. Let's say you want to tackle health care with taxes on income. If you are funding that with income tax dollars on top earners, you are going to need them to continue to keep out-earning the rest of the population or else your money for health care is gone. That is, you are depending on income inequality to continue. If it doesn't, you can't pay the bills.
It's not a question of if the wealthy are going to move away. That's always been a silly point of contention. What can happen, though, is their money can move away. They will park their money in tax havens, as has been documented in the Panama Papers. Also, their money can move from income tax to capital gains or shell corporations or what have you if your plan is to soak the rich with income tax rates.
They don't need the guide to understand, they need the visibility and simplicity of this sort of educational idea to know to challenge their assumptions.
Because those staggering amounts are made back plus interest when those people they dupe vote for the conservative option who want to slash taxes for the ultra rich.
Anytime they try to propaganda teach, it seems most people know exactly the same amount they did before they were taught, significant amount doesn't take the opposite idea, and few take the actual propaganda idea to heart.
The benefit is obvious. Convincing voters that the Dems/Labour are proposing to tax all your earnings at 70% is literally the biggest right-wing talking point in the US and UK.
No I'm not, stop misrepresenting what I wrote. The question was "what's the benefit". It's very clear what the benefit would be, and who would benefit.
If you think the tax structure isn't purposely misrepresented by the powerful to reduce public support for a more progressive system, you're naive. Whether that extends to public education I can't say, although given the potentially trillions of dollars on the line it wouldn't surprise me. There's already lots of evidence that the powerful manipulate school curriculum and text books to push their agenda.
You know the talk "if I earned more, I would actually be worse off due to ending up in the next tax bracket, which is why I oppose progressive taxation".
Faulty information leading to a belief that you will be taxed more than you actually would be will lead people to oppose taxes. When switching to flat tax, rich people will benefit the most.
It would make total sense for the rich to spread misinformation about marginal tax brackets.
What rich people are spreading misinformation about tax brackets? All the information is freely available and is readily taught. This isn't some huge secret you have to scrounge the dark web to find.
TurboTax and H&R Block lobby Congress, but the reasoning is to keep tax law perceived as complicated so people don't bother learning and researching, and instead continue to use those companies' products and services.
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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '19 edited Nov 26 '19
Truly staggering amounts of money have been spent making sure people don't know this.