What a bizarre system. Tax should be taken from your payslip. There should be no need for the individual to figure out anything, unless they are self employed.
Income tax always struck me as a deliberate way to make your average joe hate taxes when they could, very easily, be calculated at time of payroll without you ever being shown the “pre tax” amount.
I don’t care about seeing the amount or not. I care that I have to deliberately set up my withholdings incorrectly to hopefully not end up owing too much more at the end of the year. If I set it up accurately I would end up owing thousands more.
I’m not sure how withholdings works for your paycheque, but you request where the number is set.
If I set it up accurately
You define what’s accurate for a percentage when you set it.
Yeah, it’s a shit show over here. You kinda guess at how much you will need to pay in taxes, hold back that amount in your paycheck, and hope for the best. And if your life situation changes or the incoming government fucks around with the tax codes, your estimating will be off. Getting it down to a very small refund is the optional solution, but it’s not always as easy as you’d think.
And if your life situation changes or the incoming government fucks around with the tax codes, your estimating will be off.
That’s kinda what quarterly estimated taxes are for. At the end of every quarter, if things aren’t lining up and your estimates were too low, you can pay extra tax to bring things in line.
The estimate doesn’t have to be too precise though. At long as you pay at least 90% of what you owe this year or 100% of what you owed last year (whichever is smaller), you’ll be fine. Any less than that and you’ll be hit with an underpayment penalty.
It’s better to owe money rather than get a refund, as long as you pay enough to avoid the underpayment penalty.
I get that it’s ideal to owe, but I would rather a refund of a couple hundred dollars than owe a couple thousand. Part of the issue is inconsistent income, though. If it was just a single flat salary for the entire year that should be simple, but when you add in variable pay rates and shift differentials and shift bonuses it all gets messed up.
I totally understand. I hate owing a lot too, but sometimes I get the estimations wrong. I’ve got a fixed yearly salary, but a big portion of my pay is stock (RSUs) so the tax I owe varies based on when I sell the stock.
A lot of things suck, but setting up your withholding is easy, and in 30 years of paying taxes, I’ve never accidentally withheld too little.
I hadn’t. I’ve also withheld to much and got a warning letter from the IRS. It’s at a point now where things have been optional for the last few years. But with the new tax changes Trump is bringing in, I expect I’ll go from getting a small refund to owing a bit next year.
Actually you define the number of deductions to with hold. The more deductions you claim, the less they take out.
That’s because Republican “tax cuts” are often just a change in the withholding rate.
They already do that tho, payroll tax is paid by the employer without the employee every seeing it.
It is taken from the payslip. But then they have us verify what they already know and if you make a mistake you’re punished for it! It’s bullshit.
I want so bad for the US to do it the way every sane country does it; they just send me a thing so I can make sure they’re accurate and only need to take action if they fuck up.
You can thank Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, for making taxes as difficult as possible. They spend a lot of money lobbying to make filing taxes more difficult.
But what about the tax preparation industry? Won’t anybody think of the shareholders? For shame.
Yuuuuuuup.
That’s how it is here in France. It is calculated according to the previous year income, so if you get a raise you’ll have to pay a little bit more at the end the following fiscal year, but that’s often very little. Last time I got a 2500€ yearly raise, I had to align something like… 100€ 😆.
Why, though?
I’m in Germany and my employer kind of knows how much they pay me. So they can easily calculate the income tax correctly. It’s just assumed that each month’s salary is 1/12th of my yearly income and taxed appropriately.
You can literally live your entire life without “doing taxes” even once (though it’s a good idea for your individual deductions).
We are taxed on more than just wages. Additionally, the way tax law is structured here, because of S-corporations and partnerships (structures which own/run companies), these both flow through activity to the individual tax payer which is then taxed at that level.
If it’s just wages, lots of Americans work 2, 3, or even more jobs (not just during the year, but at once). Our tax rate tables are set up so you calculate them based on you having one job, so when we start a job it’s calculating it at only that one income.
It’s the same in the UK - employer deducts the tax and National Insurance (which pays for health care, state pension etc), and most of the time it’s correct.
This year I had to do my own tax calculation because of an inheritance, and it was such a pain! But I got some guidance from the HMRC phone line and filed the return online. It turned out I owed a lot less than I’d thought.
Even in Germany you typically get a little money back if you do your taxes as a regular employee. Though that’s far, far better than owing the state money at the of the year.
I agree that the employer part should be more automatic, but don’t forget it may not the the only income. You can have properties, you can have share and dividends. All that do not happen all at the same time, so it is far easier to calculate on an earlier snapshot than continuously recalculate every time something changes.
Might be because of tax brackets and not knowing ahead of time if you’re getting a raise. E.g. maybe you are the top of some bracket for most of the year, and youre on track for not surpassing it by the end of the year. Then you get a raise near the end and it bumps you over.
Should they take a huge amount off your last couple payslips? Or just let you pay it in taxes later?
Might be better for some people to pay via taxes instead of automatically losing the money for that month.
Just a guess though.
That’s a solved problem, though (and I described it in my comment). If you always assume the current month’s payment is 1/12th of your yearly salary, you already pay according to the tax bracket relevant to you. You might overpay a bit, but most people don’t double their income within a year, so the refund is typically not that much.
Taxes are taken from the payslip, but there’s a bunch of other things that can affect your income taxes. For example, you need to pay income tax on bank interest and capital gains tax on investments you sold during the year. There’s also a bunch of deductions that reduce your taxable income - for example, if you have a mortgage, you can deduct some of the interest.
Of course, the IRS should already know most of this stuff, so I’m not sure why they make us tell them again.
They do deduct taxes from your paycheck. Basically once a year, you have to true up and figure the exact amount you should have paid. If that’s less than what was withheld, you get a refund.
Well plus there are taxable events that aren’t on your payslip. If you sell goods over a certain threshold. If you get a taxable distribution from an investment account. Etc. Edit: also the IRS doesn’t know about what you have that’s eligible for deduction.
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Taxes are not the problem. Billionaires grabbing the money on the other side are the problem.
Know the difference
The people most capable of carrying the tax burden are the people most likely to cheat their way out of paying taxes.
Dont forget actively using the government against the people
Lol yeah because taxes are the problem. It’s supposed to be more tax for rich less for poor. You have literally done a 360 reverse Robin Hood no scope self own with the taxes. Because they are the problem. They would change everything if a normal person would tax the demonic corporate entities and stop taxing and punishing your own veteran old people but nah, it’s only a problem when it affects billionaires
Just look at high tax countries, like Sweden, Finland, Norway. They are pretty functional, although not perfect, with pretty well-working social systems. Look at countries that are all about avoiding taxes like… the US. Look at the UK, and what Thatcherism did to it. Social services are falling apart, if still existing at all.
Whoever says taxes are a problem, implicitly says schools, streets, firefighters, … should be privately owned. And guess who would be the private owners and what they are going to do with prices :)
Exactly. There’s fact and there’s fiction. It’s to me no doubt that privatisation breeds enshittification
This is a strange combination of wrong and right.
Taxes are also the problem in countries like the US and China wherein income tax only exists to remove currency from circulation. There’s plenty of other ways to do that in a digital world.
The rich would just use crypto
Don’t worry DOGE will fix that and every American will get a refund!
Yep, and this cartoon feels like America would keep voting for this stupid fascist stuff as long as they keep promising the Libertarian ideal of lower and lower taxes.
Americans trained to defund America, the enemy was inside all along.
Have you read A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear?
At the end of the libertarian experiment (which surprisingly ended in failure) they had almost no services in the town yet still paid as much taxes as the neighboring towns which had tons of fully funded services.
And they got over run by bears. It’s a good story if anyone wants to look it up and know more.
My favorite is that everyone had different idea what true freedom was and they kept treading on each other’s freedoms.
“the first matrix was a paradise”
And they didn’t even deliver on that one simple thing.
Taxes go up for every voter making less than 357,000$
… Right into Col. Musks bank account!
Colonel Musktard?
The one and only
Not of MUTT can have anything to say about it
It’s very hard to find the motivation to pay taxes to a federal government that doesn’t represent me. “No taxation without representation” drove the revolution against our original king after all…
Now that it’s clear the Federal government is just using tax money to give to billionaires, it’s going to be extra painful this year. It genuinely just feels like a protection racket now. Pay money to the ruling class, or their enforcers will haul you away to prison.
Out of curiosity, were you of voting age in 2016?
Yes, and I voted for Hillary, for all the good it did.
Yes, and Bernie in the primary.
I ended up owning $38
fucking win! I’m not going look at the total paid in thought, it’s much much more than $1.2k
Haha, my last tax filing I owed another $40k.
My own fault for not paying taxes during the year though.
How fucked are you if you don’t file?
I didn’t file last year, because I’ve been in a clusterfuck of borderline homelessness and odd jobs for the past two years. Idk if I am even able to file this year if I didn’t last?
if you’re making money and don’t file, it’ll catch up to you. If you’re poor and don’t file they will make your life harder when you try to collect social services
Big part of it was the surprise illegal eviction my ex got to do when he wanted to move in his prostitute (cops in OK don’t give a shit about your rights if your trans lol). Navigating the divorce system with no money, all the paper work that I have no idea if survived the parents guest room -> friends couch -> apartment.
There aren’t social services here anyway at least lol
I wish you the best, friend. Maybe when you get your feet under you, the land should be a different place? Washington State will treat you much differently but you would have to deal with the weather change…
It sounds like you aren’t making much money, so you probably don’t owe much, if any, in taxes. For the year 2024, if you got a W-2 from your employer, you should file. What you did in previous years won’t affect your ability to file this year. Who knows? perhaps you will get a refund.
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Hahaha no. That would be too easy. Americans, please correct me if I get any of this wrong:
The IRS knows how much tax each American owes, but each American has to fill in a needlessly complicated and obscurely worded form (or set of forms) outlining their incomings and outgoings and then calculate the tax they owe for themselves, and then take steps to pay that amount.
And if they get it wrong they are punished.
There’s software that helps with the needlessly complicated paperwork, but the company that makes it is in cahoots with the IRS, and so buying a copy or hiring an accountant are all-but necessary to get it right and not be punished.
This is largely the reason it stays the way it is, because an entirely unnecessary industry is being propped up by the struggles of American taxpayers.
Oh and sometimes the IRS gets their internal calculations wrong, and if you don’t get what they got, you have many, many hoops to jump through to prove that what you did was right and what they did was wrong.
The American Dream™
you are solid with the exception of needing a tax advisor(it’s actually super simple if you are a typical w2 worker), and that the IRS is not in kahoots with the tax companies, they actually were up until Trump became president working on a free tax submission system that didn’t require you to put any values in, because trying to get anywhere with passing anything better was met with massive lobbying from those tax companies.
Of course trump fired the entire dev team working on it almost immediatly, but it’s still up /for now/ just likely isn’t going to be worked on anymore
I’m getting a $10,000 refund for federal income tax (overestimated when paying my estimated taxes), but I owe $9,500 for Californian income tax. <_<
If Americans want a proper country, yall better get used to paying 40% taxes like in Europe muhahahahah!!!
Ok, some parts of Europe…Bracketed income tax is a thing for a reason, and it is a good reason.
more income == more tax.
If I’m making less than $20k/year, there’s no reason to give a shit about my taxes, just let me live yo.
If I’m making $200k+/year, then we have a conversation on our hands.
If I’m making 2,000k+/year, then we have a problem and the conversation should have have been completed by now.
edit:
exact numbers are not relevant. if you have a functioning brain, then you know what I mean.
Uh… Amazon, apple, Google, the billionaires etc all these entities pay
NOTHING
It’s not how you make a sustainable society
With state taxes, my top tax rate is above 40 percent. Are we counting healthcare and social security as taxes too? Where’s muh proper country?!
This government doesn’t deserve our tax dollars. Theyve made it clear they’re funneling as much as possible straight to the billionaires.
Just don’t pay.
And what would that do?
They already run a deficit, so they’ll run a bigger deficit. Printing money is a flat tax on everyone. So not paying taxes is just applying a flat tax on others.
Plus you get to go to jail and cost me money to support you there.
I’m all for effective protest, but this doesn’t seem to be it.
(Stupid question) Why would they print more money instead of just having a higher deficit until congress increases taxes on the poor?
It’s the same thing really. When they run a deficit, they’re paying money to somebody, so that money enters circulation causing inflation.
Boy they are not funneling shit it already all goes to them openly for years. You are feeling the aftershock. And many people have told you that your working class is being robbed blind. But you did nothing but fuel the fire. You protested then you said cringe to yourself about the process and the oligarchy laughs every time
Taxation is theft
Good luck getting that tariff money to pay for local roads and schools.
I’m sure that Elon Musk will agree with you.
Before the feds went fascist, this was hyperbole. Now it’s simply the truth, for federal, anyway. At least my state taxes are still being used for public benefit.
Two thefts make a restitution
