Here’s an e-mail I got yesterday from a reporter from National Public Radio, looking for some volunteers for a story that requires someone who is both willing to be open about their finances and who also keeps a close accounting of things.
Jonathan – I am working on a story for National Public Radio about taxes. […] We want to track all of the taxes paid by one average American. All the taxes. Property tax, income tax, sales tax (as best we can), hotel taxes, airline taxes, capital gains taxes…
We just want to give listeners a sense of all the taxes we pay. The theory is that we might be surprised at how much we pay in non-income taxes. […] Perhaps one of your readers would fit the bill.
I’m still trying to be anonymous, but if you’re interested, please e-mail Tamara Keith directly at tkeith -@t- npr.org.
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look at the bright side… in this country we still get a lot of good things for the taxes paid (although we should get much more because it is a lot of money that usually gets wasted in wars and other unproductive bs). Our taxes should help to develop a much better and affordable health system, for example.
in other countries people pay high taxes and in return you get power outages, bad roads, badly trained and uneducated police, inefficient justice system, etc
It’s not that I like to pay high taxes, not at all, but just don’t forget the positive side 🙂
May I humbly disagree with Mr. IDontLikeToPayTaxes.
There is no bright side to government waste. There is no bright side to self serving. The fact that there is greater corruption somewhere else is not a “bright” side.
I commend NPR for wanting to do this article.
I see your point Mississippi Mike, and I also am disgusted by waste, but IDontLikeToPayTaxes has a good positive attitude and there is nothing wrong with that. We have to be realistic… the government has people in it. people. some of them are corruptible and some of them are simply incompetent, and some amount of “waste” is inevitable. That doesn’t make it okay but we need to be realistic here and not up in the clouds.
There was a news story recently, I believe it was in Great Britain but am not sure, about the government enlisting private industry’s help to unccover welfare cheats. I believe they would give credit card or financial companies access to government databases in order to allow them to correlate household spending with fraudulent welfare collectors.
We can either have our privacy, or put up with some waste.
A bit ironic that the tax-funded NPR is producing the story?
There’s waste everywhere. In corporations, governments, individual households, individual spending