Maybe today's Teaparty tax protestors DO have a point. Do you feel you get value from the taxes you pay?
A new report out from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finds that Canadians get a great deal of value from what they pay in taxes:
According to the study, Canadians get an average of $17,000 worth of benefits from their tax-funded public services, which also include such items as pensions, child-care benefits, roads and police services.
That translates to about $41,000 for a middle-income family — or 63 per cent of its yearly income.
For households earning $80,000 to $90,000, public-service benefits are equivalent to about half their total income, according to the study. In other words, an upper-middle income Canadian household would have to devote half a year's wages to pay for the public services their taxes provide.
"The vast majority of Canadians are getting a quiet bargain by investing in taxes that produce enormous public benefits," the analysis states.
And these benefits are broadly shared by people at all income levels and throughout the different stages of their lives:
While utilization of the benefits tends to vary with age and household composition, their value tends to remain relatively stable. So while families with older children might get more from the education system and less from health care, a senior might get more from the public-pension and health-care systems.
People who complain about taxes (at least in places with a reasonable social safety net, like Canada) are failing to look at the big picture, for the society as a whole and for themselves as individuals:
While cutting taxes might appear to leave an individual with more money in their pockets, they are in fact losing out when it comes the whole equation...
"Tax cuts don't give you money for free. They introduce a trade off between a private benefit in the form of lower taxes and a reduced public benefit.
"For most Canadians . . . that trade-off is not very favourable."
But perhaps for Americans it is, because the social safety net and other benefits they get for their taxes are so minimal.
A minimum of 21% of the U.S. budget is devoted to military spending, more than half of federal discretionary spending - and that doesn't even count the large amount of military spending done off-budget through supplementals. Some of that spending means jobs for people in the military and defense industries, but how broadly are the benefits shared beyond those affected individuals?
If more spending were devoted to making everyone's lives better directly through improved schools and access to higher education, universal health care, a cleaner environment, better roads and public transit, and new forms of renewable energy they might find less to grumble about when it comes to paying taxes.