Because that's how it works in other countries, and that means people get less riled up culturally about tax
In the US there is a feeling of lacking representation on both sides, which I suspect is due to corporate lobbying and the culture wars, and I think a feeling of ineffective spending, again I think due to lobbying, and also pork barrel projects.
I think the answer is to remove corporate lobbying and limit campaign spending.
Except that a lot of tax filing companies require a bank account with an American address, so it's always an even bigger hassle.
(I.e., most people have already been deprived of the funds for some fraction of the year; what interest is served by making them waste time finding records and jumping through hoops and potentially paying a third party to help them provide the IRS with information that it mostly already has?)
To that end, I would like taxes to be due about 4 Tuesdays before the Election Day Tuesday. If you want to vote for politicians who are campaigning on spending a lot of taxpayer money for good programs, so be it, but do it with recent memory of having paid your taxes (assuming you are in the slight majority* who pay federal taxes on net). If you want to campaign on spending a given amount of taxpayer money, whether more, the same, or less than today, your campaign should be interpreted close to taxpaying time.
I don't want it to be more onerous or annoying to pay taxes. I do want people to recognize that taxes and spending are linked (and frankly, ought to be more closely linked than they are today, IMO).
* - which until very recently was a slight minority of households who paid federal taxes on net.
>I would like taxes to be due about 4 Tuesdays before the Election Day Tuesday.
Most people pay taxes in small increments every 2 weeks then get a refund around tax day, so your plan may not do what you think.
>I do want people to recognize that taxes and spending are linked
To your own point, they really aren't. [0]
>But do it with recent memory of having paid your taxes (assuming you are in the slight majority* who pay federal taxes on net)
To add some color on this [1]:
But, for the most part, people don’t pay income tax because they have little income. About 60 percent of non-payers make less than $30,000 and another 28 percent make between $30,000 and about $60,000.
Of the 72 million households that will pay no federal income tax this year, about 24 million, or roughly one-third, are age 65 or older.
[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17dyP [1]https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-...
Under that system, I'm totally fine if people get a $1K refund after writing a check for $15K in taxes withheld. That would still demonstrate the linkage sufficiently to inform their voting choices.
[0]https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-individu...
That's OK, especially since most of those who are now over 65 and retired worked and voted on reps/platforms/policies from 18-65 and earned income/paid taxes for probably ~40 of those years.
The problem is that would only apply to federal taxes. Not state or local income taxes, nor real estate taxes, or retail tax, or tax on gas or other things you might buy or use.
Paying estimated quarterly taxes four times a year wasn’t bad. I calculated my withholdings, remitted my tax payment through EFTPS, and was never surprised at tax time. I don’t think I ever got a refund or owed when I was doing it myself.
I learned that many people who have never contracted before are shocked they have to do this, lost on how it works, and had (then) no good place to go for actionable advice. I found that surprising and kind of sad in a way. We could be doing so much better with financial literacy.
But, get a raise, take a pay cut, find a new job, start or stop a second job, or a third, or fourth, get paid hourly, get sick, take time off to care for a sick family member, have a kid, go back to school, graduate, get married, get divorced, get a mortgage, pay down your mortgage, ... There are all sorts of scenarios that could change your tax situation on both the federal and state level, making it difficult to calculate how much you would owe up front.
What it really boils down to is our tax codes suck, and too many rich folk are keen on keeping it that way.
Setting aside the 90% thing, to your original point, paying taxes is not a voluntary thing. There is, however, at least some flexibility in how you pay them.
The flip side of this is: who cares, withholding is actually fine. For a vast majority of people, estimated withholdings is pretty close, and the few percentage points one might earn on a $1k refund in the meantime just isn't worth it.
In my opinion, the best easy tax situation would be that at the end of the year we can skip (most of) the filing step and I either get a check or a bill.