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Our taxes go to punitive enforcement now. ICE has become massive, gulags being built, our military is massive, now trump is making agencies to spy on and amass data about Americans, etc. but social programs are being cut, scientific programs are being cut, citizens protections cut…
Plenty of money for punishment. None to improve lives.
It's also a handout to Israel
We shouldn't. We should protest by organizing the largest tax fraud push the country has ever seen. Someone should create a website to coordinate this effort. Maybe it could even grow into a movement where everyone helps each other to not pay any taxes at all.
If you claim to be exempt from federal income taxes, you can withhold those on your paycheck. Talk to your HR department. If you switch jobs, when you sign up for everything make sure to explain the situation. As in, I am exempt, as I did not make enough money last year. Do not charge my paycheck for federal taxes.
Don't explain the situation to anyone. All HR (actually, the payroll department) needs is a new W4, instructing them on how much to withhold from your pay for taxes.
You dont need to explain your reasoning to HR, and HR probably shouldn't know your intentions anyway.
Very true and correct.
somebody has to pay for ICE being one of the biggest armed forces in the world.
So you don't go to jail.
They don't really care to have a reason any more.
Yeah but the orange manbaby did funny impression of a disabled person, and that speaks to my inner dickhead
The threat of violence against our person and family, that's why.
General strike is still legal and more efficient than not paying taxes which will land you in jail. Withhold the means of production long enough and Trump might just fall out a window.
Its crazy to me that its incredibly hard to convince Americans not to go to work.
Do they think the police are going to evicted 1/3 of the population? (Assuming we were wildly successful)
Do they think the government wont recognize how important it will be to stabilize the workforce and offer relief, lest risk more strikes?
Do they think, myself, your neighbor, wont empty my pantry so you can be fed another day and we can carry on?
The only problem is you thinking you need to sit it out. Its the exact opposite, if you cant afford to strike youre the one who needs to fight. Youre the one who is getting fucked the hardest.
Yes, we need to meet a threshold to where we cant be ignored. No its not easy, but look at the alternatives. Carryon like this until we are actual slaves to disgusting GOP masters (Id rather be dead) spit. Open war against the world's most advanced military?
No, cut off the corporations and make them answer to you. After all, they are you.
To me it's a no brainer and the last option before armed revolution. As JFK once said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
"still legal"
Since when has that ever mattered? Remember, the first unions and labor strikes weren't legal but that didn't stop them. They didn't become legal until we forced the State to meet us on equal terms.
Also, the Constitution doesn't matter anymore and crime is legal
Never mattered in the first place. It's just a piece of paper with scribbles on it made by people hundreds of years ago, ascribing to a culture with norms that we know today to have been incredibly regressive in their conception, who never could have imagined society as it currently exists. It's an outdated document that has sorely been needing to be replaced, wholesale not simply amended, which other countries do routinely. What matters is the ruling authority which governs the political entity that that piece of paper is supposed to represent and how they enforce their interpretation of what is scribbled on it.
Who holds the authority to dictate what is or isn't crime? Why do people respect or validate that authority with their compliance when it is so clearly oppression and restrictive? Cause where I'm standing, the ruling authority of this country is illegitimate and people need to be disobeying en masse. Their laws and documents which grant them their ruling authority be damned.
And quick reminder that the IWW will help anyone (including you, dear reader) unionize their job, no matter what it is, and even if you can only get one or two others on board with you!
Because the commies and socialists will steal your guns, turn your kids gay, have state funded abortions, twerk, eat hot chips and lie if you don’t vote red.
Eating hot chips and twerking sounds like a recipe for a Pollock mud mask to the front three rows.
Gallagher fans are prepared
I mean, they paid for a ticket to a shitshow, so that tracks.
How does the american tax system work?
I remember hearing 10 years ago that it was a hell of a lot of work to figure out how much taxes you had to pay to IRS, and that for filing your taxes, you often needed a lawyer or sth like that.
And then they changed it and implemented sth like "direct tax" or sth, and that means that they take your taxes from you automatically, without your intervention. Is that accurate?
To add on to the other explanations: The thing you heard about 10 years ago was likely Trump's tax bill that increased the standard deduction - a set amount that you can deduct instead of having to do a lot of math - and took a way a lot of deductions.
A deduction just means "you don't pay taxes on that money."
The big deductions that hurt was removing deductions for items people bought for work. The idea is that the employer should be providing that stuff, but that's not always realistic.
Without a doctor's note, lots of businesses aren't going to buy an employee an ergonomic chair because it costs 10 times as much as the Amazon special. They also aren't going to buy you a wardrobe of business suits that you'll only use for meetings. Being able to write that stuff off was huge for some of us.
I had to convince my side gig (teaching scuba and underwater photography) to change me from employee to contractor because I suddenly couldn't write off my gear.
Tell me about it. I'd been fully remote for about three years before that took effect, and I could take a pretty hefty deduction for my home office because of how it was calculated
It's pretty straightforward for most people if you're filing for yourself. It only gets complicated if you do itemized deductions which only makes sense if your total deductions are greater than the "standard deduction" (which I think is like $12,500 or something? The tax app does it for you).
You decide how much withholding that your job will do when you are hired (you can have it changed if you want). You can choose to have them estimate based on how many dependents you have and deduct that from each paycheck. It will usually be slightly more than you actually owe, so you get a return when you file once a year. Or you can choose to not have them deduct anything, and then pay the IRS the total amount when you file.
The latter is probably the smarter way to do it in that you're not essentially loaning money to the IRS, but in a country where most people live paycheck to paycheck, people don't like the idea of having to write the government a 4 to 5-figure check every year.
I'm self employed. My taxes are about six forms that cross-reference each other, a pita for sure. Also I pay a higher tax rate than billionaires.
No, not entirely.
We have taxes taken out every paycheck that is kind of like an estimate of what you actually owe. At the end of the year, you file complicated paperwork to determine what you actually owe. Big tax companies lobby hard to keep it this way.
For anything more complicated than a very basic life, people often use a tax company (like TurboTax or HR block) for help, which costs money. For even more complicated ones, people may use an accountant.
It's a ridiculous system and the lobbyists keep it like that
That isn't how taxes work in the usa. The government borrows money from your/our future prints it to pay all its bills. Taxes just cover a bit of the expenditures when they come in. The government can care less about balancing the budget. So it doesn't matter if they get their money throughout the year or in April you wont hurt them. Only thing at risk is general people being audited and hurt also i believe you pay a penalty for not paying through the year. Since I have been alive we never have had a surplus. It would take years of a democratic presidency for the surplus to hit as the programs take years to produce profits and reduce the deficit. Sadly a democratic president/platform never stays popular for long enough.
I wonder what sort of impact it would have if everyone who's upset with Trump's lawlessness adjusted their tax withholding at work to not withhold anything. They'd have to save the money so they can pay their taxes next April to avoid legal trouble, but in the meantime, federal income could get hamstrung.
They'd just use it as an excuse to cut more programs.
Hell, according to the CBO, the current bill is guaranteed to cause an imbalance in the budget, which thanks to existing pay go rules means across the board cuts to everything, including Medicare.
This way they didn't purposely or directly fuck over Medicare. It was just an oopsie.
Food for thought: private income tax was levied in the US to bolster the Civil War effort against these fuckstains' ancestors (and, largely met with resistance, at the time), but then quietly forgotten to be removed again. IIRC, it was most recently given legal precedence when corporations became people. 🤔
Because federal thugs and hackers will garnish your wages and steal your property if you do not.
Corporate tax cuts are economic growth, which helps approval ratings.
Deficits are an easy way to please everyone by offloading austerity to the future.
So every government in all of human history has borrowed from the future, and have even curated their economists to push a message that deflation is dangerous and that debt needs to be monetized.
Then for some reason debt has exploded, crypto and risk stocks are completely disconnected from reality, and the bailouts get larger and larger.
That golden droplet ain’t money trickling down.
This in my view is the main cause of inequality, how could it not be when average people make a static salary while the money supply grows 8% a year?
Yup. Pretty much.
Cool. Hiw about a national tax exempt status followed by a general strike. Starve them out.