We Should All Add Up Regressive Taxes

[liberalmike27]

I just wonder how it'd affect people, were they to add up all the sales tax, gas taxes, property taxes(prorated), tolls, utility taxes, and other types of taxes like fees (another clever word for tax) we pay each month.

It'd take some doing, for one, you'd have to find out how much your gas taxes are each month, which wouldn't be easy. But say you buy $400 worth of groceries each month. I don't know how much your taxes are, by mine are 9 percent, so that alone is another $36 I pay each month.

http://www.alabamagasprices.com/Tax_Info.aspx

Alabama is a low priced state, and low pay I might add, since we are right-to-work, no union support. Gas taxes on four fill-ups in my economy car is going to be about another $15 a month.

I have no idea exactly how much my property taxes translate through my rent, for each month, but I live in a very small house.

My point is, I'm a single guy, and all of these amounts add up to a goodly portion, as a percentage of my fairly meager salary.

A bank executive however who earns a few hundred thousand a year, will spend roughly the same, though he may live in a bigger house, and buy more groceries, and have more children, and perhaps a larger car. He'll of course get all the benefits of these commodities too. As a percentage of his income, all of these smaller regressive taxes will not be nearly as large.

The post about Virginia's toll "rest stops" got me going on this again. We used to get a lot of money from the federal government, a lot more I should say. It was used to employ a lot of folks building this stuff, rest stops, roads, and I remember back in the 1960s, still getting some federal money, from that 91, after 1964 around 70 percent (I forget, but Kennedy started lowering it) we'd take trips in the summer, and there were all sorts of people out mowing the highways, and you might see 20 of them on a 250 mile trip. Now, we've got mostly hip deep grass, and rarely do you see workers. This is mainly due to the fact we've cut the taxes on the rich, and the jobs that were associated with this federal money, gone too.

I personally believe the difficulties we started to encounter in 1973 had a lot to do with both money borrowed on Vietnam, but more importantly, I think it took that long for these tax cuts to start having a detrimental effect on our economy, which eventually led to Reagen, who kept on doing the same thing, making it worse. All of this time, all of the regressive taxes began to crop up, a meager attempt to replace some of the largesse we once got from the feds, when the rich were truly made to pay their way.

So try to keep a tab for you, your family, and even just the gas and sales tax you pay each month, and figure out how many more percent you are paying. You may actually find you pay a lot more than you do in federal taxes. Oh yea, there's FICA too, only paid up to the first hundred grand earned, after that, wealthy earners, and those who subsist on capital gains, get a free ride. I don't even know how that happened, something about FDR not wanting the rich to ever do away with the program. How far we've come now, as the rich, and their corporate media, are trying to do away with it anyway, even after decades of spending the overage on foreign wars, and tax cuts for the rich. They owe that fund big, but instead of paying it back, when we get to the point of paying them back from the other taxes we collect, I'm sure they are just going to raise the rate again, and start spending the overage we are collecting specifically for SS insurance.

[endless october]

1. don't forget "sin" taxes.

they hit the poor so disproportionately that it's ridiculous.

[valerief]

2. And that bank exec has a way low ceiling on his social security tax. nt

[liberalmike27]

3. I can't Help But think

Of that Tim Robbins movie about the Depression, where the old rich coots were sitting around, and one of them said "See, you've got to figure out how to give them a dollar, and then take two back in some other way.

People will get their tickets, pay hundreds for groceries, and gas each month, but rarely do they look at all the taxes that are being extracted.

And does the media ever talk about these taxes? No, it is just the federal income tax, the only one that actually affects the richest people in our society more. They've cut the taxes on the rich, and cleverly put them on the poor, for about 45 years now. And folks don't even glance at that extra $30, and think of the clothes they could buy, or the extra food, or whatever. I might add, were we to slack up on these taxes, or give an exemption to the first ten or twenty thousand in FICA taxes, eliminate the cap at the same time, we'd be directly plugging that money into a struggling economy, as almost all of it would be spent.

[LiberalAndProud]

4. You pay taxes on groceries?

Groceries aren't taxed in Nebraska.

[liberalmike27]

5. They've Kicked Around Getting Rid of them

But as of now, we still pay the taxes on groceries.

Hell, Alabama is so poor, it really can't afford to give up those taxes, and we've got one of the worst systems in the U.S., which we did manage to recently change a bit, under Republican Riley. He's not the worst republican I've seen in my life, and some of the republicans in the state don't seem to like him much. He's more like an old-style republican, before the rest of them went into the insane-asylum, as Maher put it.

But a great response when folks throw out a consumption, or flat tax is to say "Yea, I'd go for that, as long as we get rid of every other type of tax, sales, gas, toll roads, FICA, property taxes, etc....as many as you can name off." It is also a good thing to say when people whine about paying federal income taxes in general.

They really are kind of overlooked taxes. I don't know what a family of four pays for groceries or clothes these days, but I'm sure we're talking in the hundreds for sales and gas taxes. That's a pretty good chunk of change, good for a couple of fill ups were we to not pay for it.