this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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You’re free to look into the publicly available budgets of governments you pay taxes toward and see a breakdown of where every dollar you spend in taxes goes by doing some simple math. Some countries will even do this work for you and send you a breakdown of where your money went. IIRC Australia does this. But even without that you can easily figure it out yourself.
Taxes go to “the betterment of society” in many ways. They pay for all kinds of shit. Don’t be silly.
Doubt it's that simple as asking for those kind of information are usually behind red tapes and some are even confidential. Most people are not motivated enough to do that.
That's interesting was not aware of that. Only if my country does that.
Yeah agree they do I guess the way they are like blackbox makes a huge disconnect to those who are paying.
So the problem is you are unaware how easy it is to get this stuff because you never tried. Try looking it up in your favorite search engine. It is easily obtained.
You are correct that sone defense and intelligence spending is obscured.
Yeah I agree they can be search but I think my point is why we have to do this. Why it's us who has to do the due diligence where our tax go we have done our due diligence on making sure we paid our taxes exactly. Why can't the government do the same thing. I like how Australia doing it. I hope my country I am in does the same thing.
Because giving everyone a copy of a budget that most would not and can not understand would just cause new problems. Sometimes an informed population hinders things more than it helps.
If you're in a lot countries, especially the US, your taxes also go toward killing innocent people including children. I don't mind taxes at all in theory but in practice in America the fact that our infrastructure and societal support systems are in shambles doesn't make me feel like paying taxes helps anyone except the tax dodging billionaires.
You're dismissing this person's very valid concern.
American infrastructure and societal support structures are “in shambles” because of the very crowd that decries taxes. They chant about government being useless and private industry being better and how we shouldn’t pay so much in taxes, then elect people who will do their damnedest to ensure that government is useless.
The person you responded to doesn't sound like that and I for sure am not. I would even be okay with higher taxes IF they were actually going to non shitty expenses. I'm simply saying I see their point. It's very fair to feel like taxes are a ripoff when they don't go toward good things so often, especially knowing the rich pay incredibly low rates compared to the rest of us
Not really from USA so I have no idea what the situation there is but in my country Philippines a lot of budget is tied behind what we locally call confidential and intelligence fund. This fund even education department is asking for it's quite a huge part of the budget. This are not accessable to the public fyi there is no breakdown for that budget.