this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Exactly.
This is what I've been saying for years.
If you have to pay it merely because you're alive, it's a "tax".
Have to pay healthcare insurance because otherwise you will die or lose everything you managed to get from decades of working if you get sick or have an accident: Tax!
Have no other option than to pay for a car and for gas because you have to drive everywhere since the entire infrastructures is designed for that to be the only option you have: Tax!
Need to have Internet access at home because a lot of things must be done via the Internet nowadays and/or you work from home and there only one or two expensive Internet providers: Tax!
Need a mobile phone for everything and there's only a handful of mobile telephony available, all expensive: Tax!
Need a place to live and because of all the realestate "investors" house prices are insane and totally beyond your reach, and rents are high because of being highly correlated with house prices: Tax!
Must pay for an expensive kindergarten for your young kids because both members of a couple must work to keep up with all the other taxes I described above: Tax!
And, guess what, the Taxes paid to the state (be it Local, State-level or Central Government) at least have a chance to partly get back to you as benefits, whilst the Taxes paid to the Private Sector go entirelly to shareholder pockets and fuck you plebe.
In the Neoliberal era even in Europe the whole Economy is riddled with these Taxes payed directly to the Private sector because politicians in the past were payed to make laws to distort certain markets or to remove the state from regulating markets prone to monopolies or cartels (or, even more subtly, to make sure the fines for breaking competition rules are a microscopic fraction of the gains from doing it) hence large sections of the Economy and Society are little more than rent-seeking, but the US is way more extreme than Europe in this because it's even more Neoliberal and its system even in the beginning of this era was way less tempered by a tradition of society-oriented politics than most of Europe.
A LOT of effort has been spent into brainwashing Americans to think that Taxes paid into the common pot which pays for benefits for everybody (even though, in all fairness, a large fraction of that pot just to subsidies for politically connected companies) are a great burden for them even whilst they don't count in the same way all that money they're forced to put in the hands of certain private entities, even though in both cases the system is structured to make sure they have no real choice but to pay and, you know, money is money so even in the purest most selfish logic it's no less a burden if you're forced to pay X amount to the Private sector for unearned profits from merelly having a monopoly or being part of a cartel as it would be to pay X amount to a Public sector that did absolutelly nothing for you (and even in the US the Public sector does do something for everybody, at the very least basic schools and roads).
This shit has been exported to Europe but people here aren't yet anywhere as brainwashed.
I'd say those are deductions rather than taxes. Taxes just fill the state's budget, but are not earmarked for specific purposes the same way a car payment is.
The "tax" part is what you pay above what the cost of a Product or Service would be if there wasn't a Monopoly, Cartel or legal structure forcing you to acquire that product or service.
The actual cost of making and/or providing that Product or Service (plus a bit of profit to incentivise somebody to actual do it) is the part that serves that purpose (and thus can be said to be "earmarked for a specific purpose"), anything above that is just money you are forced to put in the pocked of somebody for holding a dominant market position due to natural or artificial market barriers and/or even having bough politicians to tilt that market in their favor, killing the viability of alternative products or services or even legally forcing you to acquire that product or service.
That "above natural cost" part of what people are forced to pay for essentials like housing is not earmarked for anything (since it does not go into the costs of the other side to provide you that Product or Service or the profit margin needed to incentivise somebody to do it), plus unlike taxes payed to the Public it will never come back and provide you with any benefit and even in a Democratic system you have no control whatsoever over what it is used for unlike one's traditional taxes where theoritically (the more trully Democratic a nation is, the more it is so in practice) one has some influence in how it gets uses through the vote.
But sure, you can call the part that is used to actually pay the costs of the Products and Services plus a fair profit margin, to be a deduction if you want (personally I just think of it as natural cost of living). Personally I see that part as totally fair, so not at all an unfair burden, whilst more broadly politically I actually favor a system were life's essentials are take care of for all from the common pot which is the taxes paid to the public, in this specific point I'm restricting myself to a pure Trade logic.