Via this website is a list of the ten most annoying taxes. I am not sure if I agree with the rankings, but still.
The website does seem to have many attractive features (absolutely! Ed).
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Taxing issuesApril 14th, 2009 |
 23 comments to Taxing issues |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Tax No.8. Isn’t that a Greek Urn? Dunno, but if it is, the State will tax 40% of it!
brrrm-tish!
aye thang yor.
Sorry, but am I the only person who immediately goes on to another site on finding out this is one of those annoying one-item per page lists forcing you to click through a bunch of pages to read the entire list (so that they can more page views and thus more ad revenue)?
I always found that annoying when I had dial-up, since I usually let links open up in the background, and then logged out to read everything offline. Even with an always-on high-speed connection, it’s still annoying.
While these ten taxes are fine examples of state stupidity when it comes to gouging money out of their subjects, don’t they all pale into insignificance against the upcoming tax on air?
Still, a government thinking seriously about passing a law allowing it’s citizens the right to sue that government, as well as any business, for having “suffered or expecting to suffer “harm” attributable at least in part to government inaction” where “harm” is “any effect of air pollution (including climate change),” makes even the air tax seem rational by comparison.
Since climate change is responsible for every nasty thing that ever happened or ever will happen, then as soon as the trial lawyers get hold of this they will be taking out class action suits against federal government, state government, power generators, factories, car companies, car owners and the neighbours who are still using incandescent light bulbs.
Then we can all sit back and watch America sue itself back into the stone age.
Which, fun as it may be in a macabre, train wreck, sort of way, will also bring the rest of the world economy tumbling down with it.
I had exactly the same reaction as Ted. They can be assured that I won’t be reading any of their other “top 10” lists.
Pah. Nothing beats the (unranked) “inheritance” (a.k.a. death) tax, whereby the State decides that capital belongs not to the owner, but to the State, for redistribution upon the death of the owner.
My favorite part of the U.S. version? For every $1 taxed, it costs $1.18 to collect.
In my native Australia, the two worst things to have happened tax wise are as follows
– During WWII, the federal government federalised income tax on “national emergency” grounds. In doing so, it also federalised the officers, tax collectors, etc, so that the states lost their infrastructure for collecting income tax. Since then, the federal government has collected the tax and has made “grants” to the states, usually dependent on how the money was spent, so the federal government exercised its influence on all kinds of matters that are not in strict constitutional terms the responsibility of the federal government.
– A decade or so back, the High Court of Australia (ie the federal Supreme Court) ruled that state imposed sales taxes were unconstitutional, and since then all sales taxes have been imposed by the federal government. This has removed what tax competition there was on sales taxes (not much, but some), and has been used as an excuse to impose significant extra bureaucracy (for instance, self employed people are in effect required to file tax returns every three months “to ensure they have paid the correct amount of GST”) .
However, a big positive is that the federal government never got its hands on inheritance taxes, and these were (note the past tense) always a state affair. Several decades ago, the state of Queensland (nice weather and nice beaches, although at the time a bit of an economic backwater) abolished inheritance taxes on the assumption that this would lead to a lot of affluent retired people moving there, who would then spend money. This assumption turned out to be entirely accurate, and states then abolished inheritance taxes as a response.
What this leads to is a situation in which from a taxation point of view Australia is a horrible place to be if you are actually economically productive, but it is a splendid place to go to if you are intending to die.
‘Scuse me, but I find your objection a bit odd; I can navigate it fine. So the technique gives these folks more page views and hence more hits. You object to these people making a buck?
Sheesh.
No. 9:
Beg to differ. My guess would be that it is on that form so that the government can charge an arrested drug dealer with yet another crime apart from the actual dealing, if it so chooses.
Glenn Beck came up with a nice (in the old sense of the word) example of an annoying “tax credit” (i.e. welfare payment).
Under President George Walker Bush an Act of Congress was passed giving tax credit money (corporate welfare – a direct payment) to any company that mixed its fuel oil with “renewable” stuff (environmentalism).
One of the unintended consequences of this is that some paper companies are taking the wood chip fuel that used to power their plants and mixing it with oil products – in order to get the subsidy for mixed fuels.
Endless millions of Dollars down the drain.
And MORE (rather than less) oil being used.
Jonathan:
I can navigate it fine, but it’s far less convenient to have to click through ten pages to read a top ten list than to load the list once.
Count me with Ted and Laird. I don’t perform ‘fetch the stick’ tricks so people can run up the view counters. It is also a matter of reading style, I read comparatively. If it is a list, I want to see a list, not read a series one after the other.
I also make a U-turn and exit sites that have a ‘cover page’ that I have to click through to get to the article or registration required. That is convenient in the case of the New York Times. If I accidentally hit an NYT ‘please register’ page I can exit the site without accidentally giving them advertising revenue by clicking through to the article.
It does sound like you guys are complaining about the flavor of the free ice cream, although knowing some of you I’m sure that’s not what you meant;-)
Michael Jennings< as a Queensland resident I can only agree. When the States levied various "franchise fees" including on petrol, Queensland did not do so on petrol. When a court case resulted in their abolition the Feds collected the taxes on the states' behalf. So now in Queensland we have a petrol "subsidy" as the State government gives back the fed take. No bets as to how long this lasts.
Michael Jennings: In Australia we had a state franchise fee on petrol sales. This was found unconstitutional so the Feds collected it on behalf of the states. Except in Queensland we didn’t have that on petrol so now we have a state “subsidy” on petrol as the state “gives back” the tax it never collected before. No bets as to how long this lasts as the state is now in deficit.
My list of taxes I hate-
1) Council Rates
2) State Tax of any kind
3) Federal Tax
4) Any UN taxes.
5) ‘Green’ Taxes
6) Solar System taxation
7) Galactic taxes
8) Pan-Cosmic taxes
9) Pan-parallel-universe taxes
10) Anything else.
Alisa, quite. I find the objections to this site I linked to to be somewhat odd. Clicking a couple of times on a website is hardly a great imposition or something to get oxidised about.
Nuke, I’d now like to see the list of the taxes you do like:-)
The more I think about it, the more I come around to the vision of a system of human interactions based entirely on private agreements/contracts. I can dream, can’t I.
Jonathan, our personal preferences are really beside my point. I don’t like chocolate ice cream, which most people find strange. My point was that when I’m offered chocolate ice cream for free, I don’t say “I don’t like chocolate flavor, I want vanilla”. With that metaphor now beaten to death, I will now go and try to do something productive:-)
My worst 10:
1. Income tax. The State has first dibs on your labour. It makes them think they own you. It gives them an excuse to stick their nose into everything.
2. Inheritance Tax. Nothing bought, nothing sold, just the owner not existing anymore. Since when does the State earn a big fat slice, often causing the bereaved to sell up at a highly inconvenient time?
3. Council Tax. Paying to exist.
4. Stamp duty. Paying to move house.
5. Insurance tax. Money for nothing – they want a piece.
6. Fuel duty. Pays (more than enough for) for roads but the biggest destroyer of them – HGVs – can reclaim it and VAT. Distorts transportation choices.
7. Additional luxury duties – alco, tobacco etc. Social Engineering. Damnable. Why? “Yes We Can!”.
8. Capital Gains Tax – tax on the rewards of risk taking
9. Corporation Tax – a tax on profit
10. VAT – turnover tax.
There are no good taxes, only slightly less disgusting ones.
De gustibus non est disputandum. Who says personal preferences have to be rational?
Actually, the taxes I find really annoying are the petty, time-wasting ones. Two I particularly hate are :
1) My local borough collects a $10/yr per capita head tax. So once a year they send me a bill for $10, totally unconnected to any other obligation, and I have to write a stupid check. They cannot possibly net any actual revenue from this idiocy after paying a clerk to manage the stupid tax, and it wastes the time I have to spend paying the stupid thing.
2) Even better, this year they have added a local “services tax” that consists of a $52/yr tax on anyone who works in the borough, which must be paid and filed quarterly. It actually consists of two taxes, each with it’s own income threshold below which you don’t have to actually send them any money, but you STILL have to send the stupid paperwork in every quarter saying you are exempt from the annoying tax. Worst case – if you make $1000 year, you have to file one form paying $2.50 each quarter for the school tax, and other claiming an exemption from the $10.50/qtr general services tax. And of course, once they’re done paying the processing company for managing the stupid thing they probably net less than half of the value of the tax. I suspect the processing company is only in it for the $20 penalties they get to slap on everyone who forgets to file the paperwork in any given quarter (whether you owe them anything or not).
I pay over $10,000/year in local property and income taxes, and they still see fit to waste my time to collect another $10. Every year. Ugh.
And now of course I’ve just wasted another 10 minutes of my live venting about this idiocy.
I didn’t mind the click-through thing until I tried the “Hottest Historical Women” one, where the photos and names don’t match up (although it does have some unintended comic effect).
I also don’t find Jackie Onassis at all attractive, which rather spoilt the climax. As it were.
The only taxes I like, Alisa, are ones that have been repealed! And I like looking through history books for ridiculous taxes, like the tax on light that Britain once had (to do with window-sizes). Dead Taxes are the only good taxes!
As for your dream, there are others with similar dreams. Anarcho-Capitalists are one such group, and the Austrian School of Economics (Ludwig Von Mises) is another. I am a minarchist, and I think of myself as being a Prolocalist, being in favour of locals and local governments.
You will especially have a hard time in Israel, of course, in this age of Aquarius (collective Humanity). The Age of Aquarius was heralded, and started, by the rebirth of Israel, which follows astrological dictates so well that it embodies the spirit of the Age. In Pisces, the non-materialist sign, the nation of Israel was dispersed and scattered under the materialist nations, a perfect example of Pisces! And in the earlier Aries age, Israel was an empire-builder kingdom. See- Israel embodies the Astrological spirit of the Age! And majority democracy is the Aquarian ideal!
Here in the South, we are entering the Age of Leo, which means we will do better embracing individualism, and eccentricity.
That could be turned into a good slogan for liberty, on a T-shirt- “The only good tax… is a dead one!”