Taxes and Mail
The government takes money from us (taxes) to deliver services (mail). My mail sucks. They never deliver to the correct address, sometimes sticking it in the wrong box in the building, sometimes the wrong building on the street. It also appears, however, that the government also misplaces my taxes. I pay my quarterly taxes every quarter, since I am self-employed. However about half way through the next year I often (this is three times now) get a letter from the Dept. of Revenue fining me for not paying every quarter. I suppose there is some symmetry there. If they can’t keep track of the money I give them, why should they be able to keep track of the letters that others send me?
(FWIW, the checks always clear, they just aren’t credited to my account. Solution? More work for me. Come up with the front and back of the canceled check(s), and write them a letter pleading my case. UGH. First time wasn’t bad, second time was less fun, at this point it is becoming downright tiresome. If they aren’t even going to get it right, why do they make me do the quarterlies?!?! Grrr.)
July 2nd, 2008 at 09:59
I’m confused. I thought that postage paid for the mail, not taxes. Do they get much from our taxes?
But it sucks that the IRS keeps screwing up.
July 2nd, 2008 at 13:55
Eh, I was just metaphorically tying my two complaints about the government together.
However, in answer to your question, historically they have done extremely poorly, for years being a fairly major consumer of tax dollars. More recently however they managed to reduce that amount and for much of the past five years have even made some money. (Net income loss is the third line, government contributions are near the bottom.) Last year they failed to the tune of five billion dollars. But, given that their operating expenses are over 80 billion, that is only about 6% of their required cash.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:21
Your taxes also pay my salary. Does that help? (Also the recaptcha words are vleck department… why is that so funny??)
July 5th, 2008 at 11:23
Well that’s usually what I tell myself each quarter. Just as long as you don’t start working in the Vleck Department. I don’t like those guys.
July 19th, 2008 at 09:36
Big bureaucracies are inevitably inefficient and incompetent. The bigger the bureaucracy, the more it will be affected by this.
I think a lot of those IRS fines of the self-employed are bogus. They know people can’t afford to fight it, and I’d not be surprised to find out that they’ve calculated how much they can squeeze out of people without a fight. They’d be wrong from time to time, o be sure, but it’d pay off in the long run.
If I got hold of a TARDIS, one of the things I’d be doing is going back to the debates over the income tax, and telling all the people who said it would never apply to anyone but millionaires that it probably affects them the least.
July 19th, 2008 at 09:56
I’d quibble with your definition a bit, too. The main thing that justified income taxes wasn’t the need to provide services (the mail, the military, and the foreign service establishment existed before the income tax and worked fine in those days-we were even able to finance a
drive to Christianize and democratizebrutal colonial occupation of a place far away from the good old USA, occupied by millions, without an income tax): the justification was the need to attack the peopleTeddy Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth” and to redistribute the fortunes they’d gotten by dirty means. It went hand in glove with the popular election of Senators, which was supposed to make the Senate stop being a millionaire’s club.
Nowadays, every single Senator is a millionaire. On the rare occasions when a non-millionaire makes it in, they usually become one swiftly-Senator Obama being an example, The income tax is a lot easier for the rich to cope with than it is for anyone else, since they can afford to fight in the courts and Joe Sixpack can’t. We’ve had periods post-income tax where income distribution become less uneuqal, but for the most part, it’s stayed pretty skewed.
No one protests too much, though, because outside of a handful of people (th majority of whom are crankish, rude, arrogant and generally unpleasant) no one goes back and actually reads the original debates on the issue.