Problem is in the US since so much of that is put into private sector hands we’d need to gather data on those costs outside of the taxes to put together a proper picture.
Another thing that’s great about aussie tax… you can fill it out yourself, it’s very easy, all online, and it takes a very short time. They also explain every question in the form and have lots of materials that you can read. For me, I finish it each year in about 10 minutes, and never think about it again.
In the UK tax is deducted ‘at source’ by your employer for anybody employed. You have a personal tax code, which tells your employer how much tax to deduct and pay on you behalf.
You then have a number of allowances you can claim against if you are eligible, to reduce your tax, which issues you an updated tax code.
In Norway, we just get it prefilled based on automatically reported data, and it’s delivered by default after a certain date - you can of course make changes up until then (and retroactively up to 3 years later).
I strongly believe that this should be the standard everywhere. Unfortunately most governments won’t tell you this, because a few of them are busy building golden temples for their authoritarian leaders, and blowing half of it on cocaine while pretending it’s the immigrants’ faults
This is a poor take, a few to vote is not the easy to go about this. Even owing taxes shouldn’t bar someone from voting as voting is about being represented and everyone deserves representation. Even hardened criminals.
Not only this, I think this should be selectable by taxpayers before they pay taxes so they can customize the amount that goes to each category. This would be the true democratic way of doing it. So, for example, based on your salary you need to pay 20k in taxes. You’d then select how much you want to go into Transportation, Healthcare, defense, education, etc.
This would quickly force the government agencies to work for their money.
This wouldn’t be truely democratic. It would rather be just like donations. Government spending works, because it’s all out into the same basket. If it weren’t, then rich taxpayers would move the movey to projects they want - and as would have very little old-age welfare, because they don’t pay much taxes anymk6and every group in society would put the money into their projects.
This is but one of many sites which show a breakdown of where our money in the US goes. Having one that breaks down each person’s personal contribution would be especially interesting, but a percent is a percent so if 20% of our money collectively goes to X, then 20% of what your paid as an individual will also go to X.
sometimes accessibility and user experience is more important than "its available if you look for it.: 99% of people don’t really have time, they have families, jobs, some leisure, cooking, paying bills, visiting family. etc. etc. So it should be easy and the FACT that it isn’t easy is purposeful whereas the Australian system is purposefully easy.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but again, it IS easy. It took me less than 10 seconds to find the link I provided. Sure, make it even easier still by including it with every tax return, but let’s not kid ourselves - this shit is incredibly easy but average taxpayers just don’t want to bother.
I would argue average taxpayers don’t know it exists and a ton of them, particularly older ones have a very hard time with technology. I’ve had to show my mother in law how to get a url from her phone to her desk top, I’ve explained what the read mode means in Firefox, and numerous other things. Easy for you doesn’t mean easy for everyone.
Yes, from a salary of about 90k. However this is federal tax. We dont pay individual state taxes as well. Our sales tax is built into the price of goods. Our healthcare is also completely free.
Comparatively, in the US a $90k USD salary is about $10,415 in federal taxes.
However, my family healthcare is about $22k in premiums alone, for a high-deductible plan. This includes the employer-paid portion, as that is part of my total compensation package. Then there is the deductible ($5k) before the insurance starts paying out. And this is not including Medicare/SS taxes as well.
You people live in a fantasy world where physical threats do not exist. The US is leading the way protecting Asia and Europe. The entire balkins would be under RU is it wasn’t for that spending.
The spending it’s needed and it’s EU/Asia doesn’t step up it’s game they’ll ultimately be a second tier power to the United States perpetually. Their call I guess 🤷♂️.
I mean sadly you’re right - people like to hate on our defense spending in the US, but who does the world look towards when Russia invades Ukraine? It sucks that it needs to be this way, but if we don’t have a strong deterrent to other countries then we’re just asking for problems. Look at how aggressive China and Russia have gotten recently, with China inching closer to an invasion of Taiwan. Who’s going to be laughing when the US is there to help Taiwan?
We know more about geo politics in the region than you do. And your drastic oversimplification does not actually result in a reasonable and coherent plan for peace in the Asia pacific region. Again I’ll say, your presence and commentary in this case is misinformed and incorrect.
I’m not sure why your being downvoted, but it’s true. Allied countries of the U.S. do not have to put much towards their military budget do to being able to rely on the U.S.
The U.S. has a strong military presence in the Indo-pacific region and if they didn’t, surely some adversaries would have already been having their way.
It’s unfortunate it comes to this but that’s just the facts.
Fun fact: in the United States you can request this same sort of receipt. It’s slightly different, but all you have to do is request it, and they can show you exactly how many brown people they shot, or godless communists they’ve brought democracy to with your taxes!
One thing to note about this breakdown is that it wasn’t legislated with good intention but it was implemented in a very malicious compliance way that completely counteracted the original intention.
This receipt was legislated by the conservative party in Australia under Tony Abbott, the surface level intention was to “show where people’s tax dollars are spent”. However the underlying intention was to show welfare spending as a huge category that totally eclipsed all other spending in order to demonize welfare, particularly unemployment welfare. In order to build public support for rolling back that spending.
However when the letter was implemented, the welfare category was further broken down as you see here, completely working against the narrative that the government at the time was trying to spin (that unemployment welfare particularly was a huge drain on society).
You can request this in most countries, especially here in Canada. It’s cool that the Aussie government makes it more transparent and accessible though. The “other purposes” seems a bit sussy-baka, though.
i’m assuming that “other purposes” are other categories that each are smaller than the ones listed. they are probably available on a website or something that gives the full list.
it would be nice if they had merged them together in wider but more informative categories though
There is no excuse for any country not to do this TBH. The math is really easy and uses already available information: take the year’s total federal spending for different things, specifically in the form of percentages of the year’s total tax revenue (hopefully the government has been keeping track of what they’ve been using the money for) and multiply by the total taxes paid by a specific person and you get exactly how much of their money went to what. This assumes every person’s tax revenue is treated the same which I’m pretty sure is at least mostly the case in every country.
If they release the national spending percentages (which they should) then it’d be pretty easy for individuals to calculate these themselves.
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