this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
683 points (96.7% liked)
Asklemmy
42489 readers
2128 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.