(I’ve been putting my taxes together this week, and It fills me with irrational bilious rage.)

If you don’t work, or work in the black market, then you don’t pay taxes and don’t contribute to the collective output of the country, and therefore, are not, according to this argument, as entitled to have a say in how we use our resources.

My question was about semantics. What is the meaning of “pay” in the phrase “pay taxes”? How is the tax money mine to pay?

Nobody said the social contract was fair. Now pay the nice man.

Of course, I could avoid all this if I went out and lived off the land in some remote place.

I’m deficient on critical thinking, not sure if it’s something I missed in high school and college or if it’s something everyone else is taught in life.

It’s emotional… the thought that I am giving my labor for say, $19 an hour, and the government takes $4 out of that every week, then the rents and the gas and the food are expensive, and the food and gas are further taxed, so I think it’s natural to wonder what if I could get all that $19 an hour to myself. I also wonder about the whole Federal thing — weren’t our ancestors somewhat in favor of a decentralized government, and only Ben Franklin and others writing the Bill of Rights the deciding factor in joining the states together to support a centralized government? And now we have this sort of weird state-law vs. Federal-law sort of thing going on (i.e., right to die in Oregon but not okay by Federal law).

It’s sort of freaky when you’ve lived on both sides of the New Hampshire border and they have no state taxes and their motto is “Live Free or Die,” heh. If you’re in Massachusetts, it’s “Taxachusetts,” if you’re in Maine (as I am now), it’s “Mainers think this or that, it’s a way of life” but I don’t really see a great quality of life for all Mainers. I still see a huge divide between the rich and the poor. We have elderly people in the upper part of the state who can barely heat and feed themselves and rich people in Cape Elizabeth and of course the Bush compound in Kennebunkport. I went to see it and we stopped at a store which had a little machine that you put a penny in, and it squishes it into an oval. And puts a picture of the Bush compound over Lincoln’s face. I just thought, wow. Wow. I’m sure they are very nice people in person but they have made some really bad decisions that have negatively affected a lot of people in this world, so naturally I want to see my tax money go toward helping others and not hurting them. If that makes any sense. It’s not “mine,” per se, because I never saw it but I’d like whatever dollars I contributed from my labor to be spent wisely. I’m just so sick of hearing and seeing about people being killed and tortured and seeing homeless people and feeling that the people who decide how to spend this money never had a clue about what it means to be poor and in need.

Sorry if I seem to be playing contrarian, but as I see it, your main points are:

1. You may not see tax payments as using your money, but most other people do. I agree with this, which is why I asked the question in the first place.

2. How would you feel if — after paying taxes — you didn’t have certain rights (e.g. to vote). I’d be pissed off if I didn’t have those rights. But what do taxes have to do with it?

You can say, “taxes give you the right to be pissed off” and I can say “why do taxes give me that right” and you can say “because when you pay taxes, you’re giving up some of your money, so that gives you a right to expect certain things in return…”

To which I’ll return to my original question: how are the taxes I pay “my” money?

I don’t know of anything else that to which we apply the word “my” in this way. If someone says, “I’m going to give you three marbles. Then, I’m going to take back one of them,” it’s a bit odd for you to refer to them as “my three marbles.” You own two marbles, not three. You got to hold a third one briefly, but that’s it.

It would be even odder if someone said to you, “I’m going to give you two marbles. There’s a third marble, and I’m going to call it ‘yours,’ but I’m never going to give it to you.”

3. You have a choice: you can let the money that is taken out of your check go to fund a government who does whatever it deems necessary for your wellbeing, or you can choose to be an activist.

I don’t know how to respond to that. That’s not a choice. First of all, you can choose to keep the money (and go to jail) AND be an activist; you can choose to give up the money and NOT be an activist; you can choose to keep the money and NOT be an activist, etc. The two “options” aren’t mutually exclusive. When you have a choice between two things, they must be mutually exclusive or it’s not a choice.

I think you’re combining two choices into one:

The choice to pay or not pay taxes. (Mutually exclusive.)

The choice to be or not be an activist. (Mutually exclusive.)

—

I feel like I’ve muddied everything by mentioning apathy. My question has nothing to do with apathy (it just arose during a discussion about apathy). In a way, it has nothing to do with taxes. Here’s my question — abstracted:

Version 1: I have two items, A and B. I give you item A only.

Version 2: I have two items, A and B. I give you both but then demand that you give me back B. If you don’t give it to me, you go to jail. (Let’s assume jail isn’t a viable option for you, so you’re pretty much compelled to give it to me).

Given either of these options, the outcome is the same. I wind up with B, you wind up with A. Let me further assert that you’re aware of all this before the transaction, so it’s not like I’ve lead you to believe you’ll be able to keep A and B and then suddenly surprised you by letting you keep only A.

Given this, is there any meaningful sense that B is yours?

Does taxation fit this model? If not, how doesn’t it?

Years ago, people were heavily taxed on say, tea, for instance. They had no choice whether the tax money went to fund a king’s house or his latest war endeavor.

Now, you have a choice: you can let the money that is taken out of your check go to fund a government who does whatever it deems necessary for your wellbeing, or you can choose to be an activist.

When you get to keep it all, however briefly (as in working under the table and not reporting it), you get to say, go to dinner, buy an extra piece of clothing, put gas in your car, or any number of things. But it’s not going to the common pool that maintains our government. If everyone did this, we would have nothing in the way of government (anarchy?).

So while you don’t see the difference to yourself, there is a huge difference to the rest of the people in this country: who pays the salary of those who are in charge of the law. I pay a tiny amount of our President’s salary. I get a say in what he does. I have the right to say it out loud (whether I like it or not). I have the right to vote for my representatives, who also get paid out of my tiny contribution.

What would you say if you were paying X amount of taxes and you were not allowed to vote, or had to work only in a job that someone chose for you, and that at 80 hours per week, and you were not allowed to worship or not worship any religion that you wanted, you could only dress a certain way, you were not allowed to speak your thoughts or write them here? Then would you care where your taxes went?

We have a really comfortable existence here, at least nowadays. So we pay taxes and we grumble but we really have it good. That’s probably why most people don’t get involved as activists, because they have enough to eat and nice places to live and there are still plenty of jobs to go around. But take all that away, and I bet you might care because if it meant that extra 20% or more was taking bread out of your mouth and there were no government services, you’d be protesting it.

Just my thoughts, sorry if I am rambling. I’m surrounded by cannons and monuments here and it was all drilled into my head as a child. Doesn’t mean I’m happy with the way things are, but I can see why people wonder about these things.

And I don’t see the difference. Yes, when I work for an employer and sanction him to withhold taxes, I never get to hold the gross in my hand; when I work for myself, I get to hold it — briefly. Either way, I don’t get to keep it. So I fail to see the difference.

The difference becomes readily apparent very, very quickly.

I think this confuses the collective responsibility of the public with your individual responsibility. (To coin a phrase, call it the Fallacy of the Individual.)

In a democratic state, you and your fellow citizens are collectively responsible for deciding who governs the state. Collectively, therefore, voters have a great deal of power and responsibility.

In particular, tax rates reflect the collective opinion of voters. If taxes get too high, voters kick out the government and elect someone else. To quote John Richards (PDF, HTML-ized by Google):

Imagine that, once a year over the past century, a representative sample of citizens in the major industrial democracies had been asked, do you think social programs, and taxes required to pay for them, should absorb a higher share of gross domestic product (GDP)? Some time after 1975, the proportion willing to respond yes undoubtedly fell below 50 percent in most of these countries. In Canada, the proportion of yeses probably stayed above half until some time in the 1990s, when concern over the relative size of government debt finally became a high-profile subject for public debate.

So it’s accurate to say that collectively, voters decide how much they pay for government services.

But this collective responsibility is more or less equally distributed among hundreds of millions of individuals. Hence your individual power and responsibility is so small as to appear non-existent. Nevertheless, it still exists. In particular, there’s a huge number of people who feel more or less the same way you do (call it the Apathy Bloc). In 2004, 45% of the voting-age population in the US didn’t vote at all. Collectively, the Apathy Bloc has tremendous power, but doesn’t exercise it.

Note that this is less of a problem in smaller countries. Power isn’t divided as infinitesimally between voters; the scale of government isn’t as large; there tends to be less of a gap between the public and elected officials.

I get why I should care what the government does with its money. (What it does affects me.)

Why should I care what the government does with MY money? What money does the government have that was mine? My tax dollars? Since those dollars were “destined” to go to the government from the get-go, in what sense were they ever mine?

I realize that they may have been briefly in my bank account — or they may have been expressed in a number called “gross” on my paycheck. Is it just a convention that we call that money “my” money? If it is convention, what sense is there in caring about what the government does with that bit of money especially?

It’s as if I gave you a package and said, “Please don’t open it. Just keep it in your living room for a month, and then I’ll pick it up.” And then, a year layer, I chastised you for not caring about what happened to “your” package. I might say, “Don’t you realize that you got the right to have that package in your living room because you worked hard? It was payment! Why don’t you care about the package?”

I can see one way in which I might care. I suppose that if I was very financially savvy, I could choose to not have my taxes withheld, and then I could “put that money into play” during the short time it was in my possession. I could use it to speculate with or whatever. Similarly, you should temporarily use my package as a coffee table.

I don’t agree with your analogy about food and shelter. Yes, I need to acquire food and shelter somehow. Let’s say I have $1000 in my bank account. I can choose to use some of that money to pay for food and shelter. I MAY be forced to use it, if I can’t come up with another way of getting food and shelter. But, if I want, I can choose to live in a cardboard box and eat stuff out of trash cans.

More realistically, I can choose how much to spend on food and shelter. There’s a certain base I MUST pay. If we rule out cardboard boxes, I must pay at least the lowest rent I can find. Or I can choose to pay higher and live in more luxury. Point is, there’s a ton of choice involved and it makes sense for me to be emotionally invested in where that money goes. (”Hey, I’m paying half my salary and yet the toiled doesn’t work!”)

I have much less choice with taxes. There’s no tax equivalent of a cardboard box. If I’m earning X amount, I must pay Y amount. Case closed. I know that from the beginning. So it makes sense to think of my salary as X - Y, not as X. In fact, I think most people DO think of their salary that way. Which is why we have the word “net.” But most people seem to do a sort of doublethink and think of their salary as “gross” too. And think of “their money” as being in play, somewhere in Washington.

You also have no choice about paying for shelter and food, but the money you use to pay for it was yours in the beginning.

It’s as if Mrs. Jones passed out colorful boxes to all the kids on the first day of school and said, “Children, this is your box. It’s YOURS and it’s very special. You must take great care of it and always be aware of how it’s being used! You may not color on it. You may not take it home. You are to keep two pencils and a pair of scissors in it. At the end of the school year, you have to give it back. But it’s yours.”

At a parent-teacher conference, Tommy’s mom asks Mrs. Jones why she hands out the boxes. Mrs. Jones says, “I want the kids to have a stake in the classroom. I want them to feel that something that belongs to them is in play here.”

I feel as if, throughout my life, I’ve been told I have ownership of many things: my country, my state, my company, my money. The more I think of the word “my” in these context, the more vaporous it seems.

I can’t just choose to move to another country. I don’t have citizenship anywhere else.

You’re right, I can choose to pay now or pay later, but how is that a real choice?

Since I’ll get in huge trouble if I choose not to pay (e.g. jail), it seems to me like someone is holding a gun to my head, forcing me to pay, and then saying, “Don’t you care where your money goes?”

It does seem a bit perverse to me to, say, make a choice to give some of your net pay to a charity and then not care whether or not they’re legit. But if someone is going to forcibly take money from me, why should I necessarily care what they do with it. Either I’ll continue to assume it’s my money, in which case I won’t care what they do with it — I’ll just want it back. Or I’ll never consider it mine to begin with (which is how I view it), in which case … why should I care how someone else spends his money.

Yes, I should care what the government does with its money. But that’s different from caring about what it does with MY money.

I ask again: If I MUST give it to the government (now or later), how is it MY money. Doesn’t it make more sense to say that there’s a certain amount of money that I’m allowed to either never have at all or to temporarily hold? It seems odd to call such money “mine.” My money is the money I’m allowed to spend.

If I choose to go live in another country (if that’s really an option for me), they we’ve avoided the question. I’m not earning money in America, so there’s nothing coming from me that belongs to me or the American government.

There are two points where, however, choice enters:

First, when you arrange the withdrawal of taxes from your paycheck with your W-4, an element of choice enters. You could offer a ridiculously low withholding number (do they accept negative ones? I heard they did) and then be “billed” for your taxes annually in the form of your tax return. It would be a several-thousand-dollar bill, most likely.

Second, you are obligated to make these payments of taxes because, in theory, you are being given, and take advantage of, various services that the government provides: paved streets, common-good services (police, firemen), and so on. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. You make the choice of continuing to live in the United States, in the state you live in, in the town you live in, and thus making yourself subject to their respective tax laws. Theoretically, you could find a low-tax or no-tax country and make a life for yourself there. You choose not to.

So why can you be considered to pay taxes?

Because payment need not be voluntarily, and because you make the choice of continuing to live in a country, state, county and/or town where the “company” running your domicile requires a “price” for its provisions of basic services, and you furthermore make the choice of arranging the amount of direct-debit payments made from your paycheck when you set up your withholding.