Taxes?

[merolpn]

Come to Florida. We are a low tax state because we have no income tax and property taxes are also low right now. If you buy a home you get a 50k exemption so your property taxes might be 2K per year for a nice house. If we could only get rid of federal income tax.

My girlfriend grew up in the Ft Myers/Naples area. She would never live there again. She also lived in Puerto Rico, Alabama, Georgia, Maryland and West Virginia and said she will never live in a place she already lived. She still owns her condo down there but it is rented out. In a few years we may consider North Carolina or Texas. Before studying for all these tests, I used to do about 50-100 wreck dives a year in New England. (yes, all winter long) The only other place with this many wrecks would be North Carolina and I need to be within an hour of Saltwater!

[ryoder]

Charlotte is nice. I spent a lot of time there back in 2000.
I wonder why she would never live where she already lived? Skeletons ?

[merolpn]

Charlotte is nice. I spent a lot of time there back in 2000.
I wonder why she would never live where she already lived? Skeletons ?

All of her family lives in CT and NY. She spent her whole life with a dad in Government that moved her all around away from her family. She said she never really felt like she fit in when she lived in the south and wants to stay in one spot for a few years.

[mrs.b]

Now, if someone argued (like Mrs. B) that the government could better (read: more efficiently) use our taxes, I'd say, "Amen." Like Merolpn, I don't stress over it. I carefully vote for officials (particularly at the local level), and then let it go. And Mrs. B., I wish your and your husband the best of luck starting a new business. I really admire people who take on challenges like that.

Oh, 99.9% of the time, I do not stress it either. If I did, I'd have stomach ulcers, be hoarse from shouting at brick walls, and it still would make no difference. When elections come, I research, vote where my conscience and logic take me (often in the minority when it comes to national elections in recent years), and hope for the best. It merely amuses me that people vote the same way time and again, then grow stunned and confused when things do not change. It's like a leak in the roof of a home. You could pretend it doesn't exist, pick the roofer that offers a cheap band-aid solution, pick the solution that boasts a permanent fix that has never been tried or tested but doesn't it look pretty?, or invest in a solution that might pinch the budget a bit but has been proven to solve the problem permanently. U.S. voting patterns say we will inevitably ignore the problem because we do not like the person that proposed it, vote for band-aids, or opt for the new and shiny untested solution, then scream and cry about how we need to pay thirty times the original permanent fix's price to gut that section of the home ten years later to repair rotted support structure about to come down on our heads.

Hindsight is always crystal clear, but Ben Franklin commented on the certainty of death and taxes, and no matter how much we look back and wish we (collectively) had lived or voted differently, both the reaper and the tax man will eventually come for all of us. Might as well do our best to make the most of our individual lives and hope the elected officials enjoy their government-funded vacations or get something out of the kickbacks to political supporters while the roads I drive on crumble.

[LaterBloomer]

Ryoder, sometimes you get what you pay for. The court system took forever to probate a relative's (simple) estate. AND it cost lots of money. With friends in my local court system, I'd ask a question about how long something takes here so that I could get an idea of how long it would take in Florida. It always too MUCH MUCH longer in Florida. And the judge of Nicole what's-her-name's case? Wow! That was embarrassing. Oh, and the Gore/Bush election? Ouch. Finally, the property taxes down there are weird. When the person who inherited the house FINALLY was able to sell it, all of the buyers had to figure out what the "new" property tax would be.

[EI2HCB]

Taxes

Good topic, Sometimes they are used for some very silly stuff, If I've got to build a road on private land the construction workers that build it get paid a significantly lower price than if they were building the same road for the government. The reason is that the government requires that the construction workers building their roads get paid higher than to build a road for a private business. This means the government increases the costs to us taxpayers of building a road because they write the checks any other entity that did that wouldn't be around very long.

As for the person who wants to support the government above what they are required to do, that's sacrifice for your country! Tax avoidance is not immoral Tax dodging is. It's legal to place money in retirement funds for when you are older and not pay tax on the money you put away, this is tax avoidance however once you retire you pay taxes on the money as you withdrawn so its actually called tax deferring. ( you avoid paying higher taxes now because of your high income and pay less once your income is lower when your older) Should you continue to pay your mortage for the full 30 years to avoid income tax which is legal, you can and it's not immoral. Can you pay your house off early and give more taxes to the government each year, yes we can! Can we donate money to a charity like save the children or the American Legion or your local VFW and avoid taxes you can and it is not illegal or immoral to do so.

[ryoder]

Good point EI2HCB. Lets say someone does a 1040EZ and doesn't consult with H&R block. That person doesn't do their due diligence and get thousands in child tax credits, lifelong learning credits, etc. Is that person being a better citizen by paying above the legal amount in taxes? I do not think so. And if that person decides not to take tax credits and deductions up to the maximum allowable that is their choice but one could do that for 10 years straight and then one year slip up on their filing making an honest mistake. The IRS will audit that person and charge them for the back taxes, fees, penalties, and interest for that one year they filed incorrectly but not in the government's favor. So everybody needs to take every deduction and credit they are able to and move all money into the right tax advantaged investments that they can. It is not immoral.

Ben Franklin was right about taxes, however our taxes are many many times higher than anything he ever paid. In the early days the federal tax rate was 4%. Now people like me pay 36% and rich people pay 39.6%. And that is just federal. If you add in all the other fees we pay the government the average middle class person pays about half their income to the government. That is ludicrous.

Check out the rates on wikipedia.

Income tax in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Publius]

My 2 cents.

Overly complicated, as usual. Poorly executed and redistributed, as usual. Too high, as usual. Apparently not enough, as usual. etc. etc. etc.

High time to get ride of a lot of junk and reform how taxes are done.

[ryoder]

I don't think we get what we pay for.
Lets take hospitals for example. People pay $100 for two advil some times. Its the bureaucracy.
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency."

[OE800_85]

Hospitals arent run by the government, though ryoder. I just posted an eye-popping article on health care costs, I think you'd like it. If medicine is privatized, it becomes this terrible form of capitalism where the buyer has no choice and no power. WHen you have an emergency you don't have time to really choose which hospital you go to. The government, however, has this power as a large buyer. For example, if you paid a 100$ "chargemaster" price for advil, medicare would have likely paid 10 dollars for it. It's much more than in a shop, but still considerably less than you as a powerless buyer could negotiate. In countries with more nationalized health care costs are lower, not higher, because of this very principle. The US government spends more money (per capita) than any nation in the world on health care, and people still have to often pay out of pocket. It's gotten ridiculous and needs to stop.