| People often think of taxes as something that "the government" takes away from them. However, a better way
to think about taxes is that they are the projects we all work on together for our survival as a nation. There
are certain projects that we've decided are important enough that everyone should contribute to them. (Some examples
would be education and military defense and social security and public transportation.) However, we can't all physically
work together on these things the way the castaways on the island worked together to find food and build shelters
and so forth. For one thing, many people just aren't qualified to help with any of these essential tasks. For another,
we might not need to all spend all our time on just these essential projects (the way the castaways did just to
survive) and in our society, there are lots of other less essential projects going on. So, instead of each of us
spending a certain amount of our time helping to work on the essential projects, we contribute to them by paying
taxes instead. A certain number of us (teachers and soldiers, etc.) do these jobs full time, and the rest of us
do our share by contributing the tax money that pays their salaries. People often talk about having to work the first four months or so of the year "for the government". What they mean is that their tax rate is around 33%, they pay about a third of their earnings in taxes, and so you can say, in a sense, that all the money they make the first third of the year is going to "the government" (and then they get to keep the money they make the rest of the year). When you think about taxes this way, they seem rather harsh! However, another way of looking at them is that in this country, we all work together on the most essential projects, and taxes are each person's way of giving that help. If we had no tax system, we'd each be spending those first four months or so of the year (or perhaps one week a month, or two days a week) actually working on those projects physically, teaching or soldiering or administering or whatever. When you look at it this way, it doesn't seem as bad. In fact, it seems more like one of the wonderful things people do: work together to achieve goals that benefit everyone. |