I ll piss in the soup, but Denmark is also consistently pushing for a total surveillance of all communications in EU
Americans are way too dumb to grasp the benefit of paying higher taxes in exchange for having more benefits. To be fair, Americans have some of the worst politicians on the planet, so they can’t trust their representatives to use their tax dollars responsibly. But American stupidity is what put those politicians there in the first place. So…
americans are also exposed to constant propaganda, so no wonder they are messed up
Hey we may be dumb, and we may be exposed to constant propaganda, but…
What was the third thing you said?
At least we have enough junk food and oversized burgers covered in a pound of cheese that we’ll die of a heart attack from clogged arteries before ever needing that health care we can’t afford. Yeah baby.
Jokes on you, we can’t even afford that shit these days.
Accidental portion control, here we
comeare.
Short attention span?
You know how abuse produces abusers that perpetuate that abuse? That but on a national level.
this is so underrated. even smart people can do stupid things. but that’s only half of the story… second half is culture (and here even european countries are not much better). in real life it is almost always worth more to look strong than to be smart. changing your opinion does not make you look strong - it makes the “other” person look like they’ve won an argument and that makes you look both weak (you didn’t stand your ground) and stupid (you didn’t know better). this is both entirely nonsense and perfectly understandable due to the culture (deeper level than propaganda). so nobody who makes it somewhere wants to do it. they will rather invent opposing false story and bend over backwards trying to defend it than concede a point to their percieved opponents… which brings us - here.
The biggest issue is that America is built on the concept that taxes are bad. The whole founding of the country is built on not paying taxes. It’s something kids are taught from a very very young age and even though they are not being directly told that taxes are bad, they are being told how great and important it was to break away from English because they made us pay taxes.
Additionally the taxes that are paid in the USand used terribly. Pretty much no one is happy with how they are allocated. Right wing or left wing. So more taxes just feels like having more blood drained from us while getting nothing good in return.
We need a major tax reform not just an increase or a decrease. I would be happy to pay much higher taxes if I felt the benefits of it. Both for myself and for the people in this country. Instead I know most of what I pay gets wated or lines the pockets of the wealthy.
Can’t miss an opportunity to mention the burger place A&W made a 1/3 pound burger to compete with McDonald’s 1/4 pound burger… except the 1/3 burger was a complete failure due to Americans thinking the 1/4 burger had more meat cuz 4 is a bigger number than 3 lol
It’s not stupidity, especially since you’re basically saying that you’re half as intelligent as stupid people.
Wait till Americans hear that Danes don’t need to calculate their taxes and pay a fee to file them.
A fee to pay taxes? Why not include it in the taxes at that point? It’s just ridiculous.
Similar to that time I went to the local garage, my car needed a new 12v battery. Fine, it got swapped for a new one. On the receipt, it had the costs broken down. The garage had the audacity to include a line for: “Charging battery 20 Euro”.
The “fee” is using a private tax preparation service. In theory skippable, but it’s just a pain to do.
Once upon a time, maybe forgivable, private sector embracing useful technology before the government was ready, but now the government actively resists making it easier to file taxes, and coincidentally the tax prep companies give a lot of money to politicians…
i used to prep tax. i had a five page schedule of fees.
i was also known locally as the dude with the most fair bills. that schedule was so long because i didn’t bill for shit i didn’t do.
Why not include it with thw taxes?
With Americans, the answer is always some private entity mixed in the middle that will make money out of it.
Yeah when they talk about single payer healthcare saving us millions of dollars, those millions of dollars saved are dollars that wouldn’t go to the insurance companies and more specifically to the pockets of people who pay lobbyists
well what did you expect
me with my business: selling uncharged, possibly unchargeable batteries
“dISCOUNT?”
But 90% don’t even know libraries offer free help filing your taxes yet.
Here in Sweden you generally don’t even need help. Naturally there are people with disabilities, or complex financial situations, but that’s not most people. For me personally, filing taxes means I log on to the tax office’s website, skim through the details to make sure there’s no egregious clerical error, and then I click a button to sign off on it. It takes about 5 minutes a year.
If you deal in stocks or buy/sell property a lot it might get a bit more complicated. I think my roomie had deductions because of how much they drives for work, so that added like 5 minutes for supplementary information.
I’m convinced the U.S. makes it complicated for predatory reasons.
Intuit (the company that owns turbotax and creditkarma, among others) has been lobbying with H&R Block for decades to make taxes as complicated as possible so you have to use their software. They just got a massive win from the trump admin too. The fed is shutting down the governments free file website. So now the monopoly is the only choice
Fuck Intuit
libraries have books in them, they are afraid they will catch the woke virus…
But libraries are cOmMuNiSm!
Is there any developed country that does that other than the US for the typical (i.e. not self-employed) worker?
Canada
I wonder if the first guy is just engagement farming or genuinely confused. Either way, there probably are plenty of people who are so “brainwashed” that they can’t fathom that “happiness” and “tax rates” aren’t linked by some law of nature.
I really wish people would wrap their heads around this
Similar line of thought regarding public vs private service providers. There’s nothing preventing public services from being as good as or better than private ones, but private ones will always want to extract more value than they provide as profit (which is the extra money left over after paying for everything, including staff). Plus they pay a whole team of people whose whole job is about maximizing profit, which can come at the expense of the quality of the service.
And with public vs private healthcare, there’s a whole health insurance industry extracting wealth from the public for the privilege of limiting their healthcare options (otherwise the healthcare providers would be the ones doing the fleecing by recommending unnecessary procedures, which probably still happens anyways). And on top of that, there’s an attitude of “just try it, even if it would be illegal, consequences are always avoided by backing down before it gets to court”.
I live in Canada and we have some of the same stuff included in our taxes.
Our whole system is pretty fucked up when it comes to taxes, but it is what it is. At least we have things in place.
Sure, I’m “paying” for other people to get healthcare, or to get social assistance, police protection, help from fire departments, ambulances… Good banks and even welfare…
I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.
I like knowing that, when it’s my turn to rely on my fellow countrymen for support, I will get it. If I’m sick and unable to work, I can get financial support, and go see a doctor without having to take out a loan or anything.
Social services are good. I’m not going to get denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure. It gets booked and performed.
And I know that Canada’s systems are way less comprehensive than most European countries. We have a lot to do before we can get to where we should be. But we’re still better off than our southern neighbors.
In Ottawa I met a guy once who was asking for some money to buy a drinkable meal. You could clearly see that he had something going on with his jaw. Buddy, I think he said his name was Connor but it’s been nearly a decade, was homeless and apparently attacked for some change and even he was able to go to the hospital and get taken care of. Our post-surgery care still needs a shitload of work but at least my tax dollars helped get him that far. Anyone who could look at him and complain can go straight to hell, through it, and into some deep, dark abyss where only the truly rotten can suffer for the rest of eternity.
It’s not everything, but it’s at least something.
Hopefully buddy is doing well, whatever his name is, and wherever he is now.
Exactly.
This is what I’ve been saying for years.
If you have to pay it merely because you’re alive, it’s a “tax”.
Have to pay healthcare insurance because otherwise you will die or lose everything you managed to get from decades of working if you get sick or have an accident: Tax!
Have no other option than to pay for a car and for gas because you have to drive everywhere since the entire infrastructures is designed for that to be the only option you have: Tax!
Need to have Internet access at home because a lot of things must be done via the Internet nowadays and/or you work from home and there only one or two expensive Internet providers: Tax!
Need a mobile phone for everything and there’s only a handful of mobile telephony available, all expensive: Tax!
Need a place to live and because of all the realestate “investors” house prices are insane and totally beyond your reach, and rents are high because of being highly correlated with house prices: Tax!
Must pay for an expensive kindergarten for your young kids because both members of a couple must work to keep up with all the other taxes I described above: Tax!
And, guess what, the Taxes paid to the state (be it Local, State-level or Central Government) at least have a chance to partly get back to you as benefits, whilst the Taxes paid to the Private Sector go entirelly to shareholder pockets and fuck you plebe.
In the Neoliberal era even in Europe the whole Economy is riddled with these Taxes payed directly to the Private sector because politicians in the past were payed to make laws to distort certain markets or to remove the state from regulating markets prone to monopolies or cartels (or, even more subtly, to make sure the fines for breaking competition rules are a microscopic fraction of the gains from doing it) hence large sections of the Economy and Society are little more than rent-seeking, but the US is way more extreme than Europe in this because it’s even more Neoliberal and its system even in the beginning of this era was way less tempered by a tradition of society-oriented politics than most of Europe.
A LOT of effort has been spent into brainwashing Americans to think that Taxes paid into the common pot which pays for benefits for everybody (even though, in all fairness, a large fraction of that pot just to subsidies for politically connected companies) are a great burden for them even whilst they don’t count in the same way all that money they’re forced to put in the hands of certain private entities, even though in both cases the system is structured to make sure they have no real choice but to pay and, you know, money is money so even in the purest most selfish logic it’s no less a burden if you’re forced to pay X amount to the Private sector for unearned profits from merelly having a monopoly or being part of a cartel as it would be to pay X amount to a Public sector that did absolutelly nothing for you (and even in the US the Public sector does do something for everybody, at the very least basic schools and roads).
This shit has been exported to Europe but people here aren’t yet anywhere as brainwashed.
I’d say those are deductions rather than taxes. Taxes just fill the state’s budget, but are not earmarked for specific purposes the same way a car payment is.
The “tax” part is what you pay above what the cost of a Product or Service would be if there wasn’t a Monopoly, Cartel or legal structure forcing you to acquire that product or service.
The actual cost of making and/or providing that Product or Service (plus a bit of profit to incentivise somebody to actual do it) is the part that serves that purpose (and thus can be said to be “earmarked for a specific purpose”), anything above that is just money you are forced to put in the pocked of somebody for holding a dominant market position due to natural or artificial market barriers and/or even having bough politicians to tilt that market in their favor, killing the viability of alternative products or services or even legally forcing you to acquire that product or service.
That “above natural cost” part of what people are forced to pay for essentials like housing is not earmarked for anything (since it does not go into the costs of the other side to provide you that Product or Service or the profit margin needed to incentivise somebody to do it), plus unlike taxes payed to the Public it will never come back and provide you with any benefit and even in a Democratic system you have no control whatsoever over what it is used for unlike one’s traditional taxes where theoritically (the more trully Democratic a nation is, the more it is so in practice) one has some influence in how it gets uses through the vote.
But sure, you can call the part that is used to actually pay the costs of the Products and Services plus a fair profit margin, to be a deduction if you want (personally I just think of it as natural cost of living). Personally I see that part as totally fair, so not at all an unfair burden, whilst more broadly politically I actually favor a system were life’s essentials are take care of for all from the common pot which is the taxes paid to the public, in this specific point I’m restricting myself to a pure Trade logic.
We aren’t socialists; we are just better at accounting
What’s the difference?
The difference is that capitalists are still in charge but things aren’t as bad.
The caveat obviously being that things aren’t as bad yet. We’re headed there.
We can still prevent worse things from happening, unless we succumb to the defeatism
Ideological drive, I suppose? Accounting is still about investment of capital.
I like to view it as a form of egoism: favouring socially beneficial policies not (just) because it helps others, but because it helps me too. Things like collective bargaining power to improve conditions for everyone (including me), worker protections (which also protect me), a solid healthcare system (so I can get good healthcare)… You get the point.
It’s my go-to argument for people saying “I don’t care about [demographic]”: This isn’t just about helping others, it’s about helping you too. Whatever good we do for everyone also includes you.
Personally, I also believe in social values, but it’s not the only plausible reason to approve of social measures.
BEING COST CONSCIOUS IS COMMUNIST
are socialists better at accounting?
Is Denmark socialist? Or just humanist?
History has shown that this is not true
If we could only train everyone to loudly hiss whenever they hear GDP or Tax Rate used as a metric to gauge a country’s value, a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Best answer ever
It’s really not possible to compare the economy of Denmark to the US when over half of the individual states have more people than all of Denmark. There are problems Denmark could not possibly face as one country is 60 times larger than the other. Denmark’s population is almost completely made up of one color and is historically homogeneous. So many issues they don’t have to face… and they like it that way.
Not defending US policy, just stating the comparison is not so simple.
Socialism is “when good at math” now apparently e.e no wonder the chud states have shitty education. Patriotism means being a moron.
Patriotism vs nationalism.
One is critical of the country, the other is blind loyalty; so to speak.
