What is income tax considered to be when it becomes extremely high?
Complaints about what the taxpayer considers are unfair practices of taxation are nothing new, and they generally stem more from how the tax money is spent than from the actual taxes themselves.
Humor and Taxes
The newspaper cartoon was once an outlet for complaints about taxation. In one memorable drawing from the early 20th century, a beggar is thanking a man for giving him a handout. There are three people in the scene, and the third is a well to do aristocrat. He is complaining because the person giving the money away to the beggar is taking it from his pocket.
Taxes began in part as tithing or giving back a portion of what was graciously received, and the giver was more in control of where that ten percent of his income went. Generally, the church gave to those who needed it, and the tithe was instrumented by those who paid it. This simple solution made the giving much easier.
Government Tax Control When governments control the taxes, the person paying is taken pretty much out of the loop to say where his contribution goes. This is why it has always been difficult to make everyone happy with taxation. In colonial America, no one liked paying England tax money because they received nothing in return for it. “Taxation without representation” was the cry that rang across the budding nation.
Although citizens have the inalienable right to vote for the men and women who will earmark where the tax money is spent, it often appears that there is little control from the taxpayer end. The closer the money is spent from where it is collected, the happier the taxpayer is, but of course that can’t always be the case. If you ask almost any adult in the U.S. how they feel about the way taxes are spent at the national level, the answer is generally that too much is spent in one area and too little in another. When millions of people are responsible for electing a single official, it isn’t possible for that politician to please each of them regarding how their tax money is spent. Not only does the representative have a difficult time following the desires of all those voters who were responsible for their election, designating where money goes is a complicated process of getting other elected officials to vote the same way. In the final analysis, no one claims responsibility and no one takes the blame, at least according to theory.
Still the democratic process is the best system of representation by government, and politicians who want to remain in office must address the people’s concerns of how tax money is spent or they won’t get reelected.