Is there a grammatical reason for people saying “I pay my taxes” instead “I pay the taxes”?
Because your taxes are the taxes you specifically pay and are specific to you and you alone.
While the taxes are the ones everyone pay. Like, taxes on buying groceries, products and services.
Do you wear “your” shoes or “the” shoes?
Does the government fuck “my” asshole or “the” asshole
!they fuck kids!<
“Taxes bad" - boomer
Yeah I mean my taxes are being put to good use for sure.
The world is literally run by pedophilic idiots that would happily skin your first born child alive in front of you if it gave them another yacht (except they would just hire someone to do it for them and watch)
US defaultism strikes again.
Generally “my taxes” refers to income tax, which is figured out individually, so they are literally paying their taxes. It’s also a linguistic quirk, like saying “my cold got better”.
yes because they are refering to the particular taxes they owe that is specific to them and their income and decutables and such. when someone mentions sales taxes they don’t say my taxes. they only say it for ones where its different for the individual and situation like income and property.
The origin of taxes is back in roman society, and the rich would pay all the taxes as a flex, a sign of strength and goodwill. It was a competition between them to be the most influential. Then taxes got shifted to society as a whole,and now they are being shifted to the poor only.
Crazy how it went from only the elites paying taxes, to now just the poors.
You only pay the taxes that apply to you. You don’t pay all the taxes.
Because I only pay mine, not everyone’s.
I’ve got bad news for anyone renting.
“My taxes” being short for “my share of the taxes.”
I do my taxes. I renew my driver’s license. I pay my electric bill. I don’t understand how else someone would say those things.
I do my taxes. I renew my driver’s license. I pay my electric bill. I don’t understand how else someone would say those things.
“I do taxes. I renew driver’s license. I pay electric bill.”
“I do the taxes. I renew the driver’s license. I pay the electric bill.”
As a non-native English speaker I know “my taxes” just sound most natural because–but only because–that’s how lot of people say it. :D
(Not that it’s relevant, but In my native language, Czech, we would not stress the “my” part, maybe only in case of the driver’s license, and even there, only indirectly by grammar. But I’m aware Czech is weird to most of the world… :D))
How do Czech pay taxes? Is it auto withheld from your paycheck or do you do forms and pay them periodically or both? Is it pretty quick or super involved or somewhere between?
We have witholding and then do forms between January and April to determine if we owe more or get some back. Those forms can be relatively simple or super complicated.
TL;DR: for “simple” employees, pretty quick and simple. for freelancers / small businesses the complexity scales based on type and size of business: from pretty quick (for freelance licenses) to more involved (for high turnover or special corpo licenses etc. i don’t really know).
Generally if you are employee and all your income comes from single employer, your taxes are done by the employer and simply withheld from your paycheck. Some are paid continuously and then balanced (excess returned, never the opposite) some time in the spring, but as employee you don’t have to fill any forms. (With small exceptions – IIRC we had to sign one “pink” form every year, I don’t recall what exactly it was for.)
For long time when I was employee I also had income from stocks, so then my employer did not have to do taxes for me so I had to do it on my own (ie. I used advisor.)
If you are self-employed then it depends on the type of business license / trade and turnover: you may need to track every expense and then compute & fill form in April (this term moves to June if you use accredited tax advisor).
There are also license types where you don’t need to keep expenses, you only need to report yearly income and tax based on that number. The license has a percentage number assigned and it’s just assumed that your expenses was that % of your income. When I was freelancing as a programmer, I used this kind of license. It was pretty comfy for me, even though i still used advisor since I can’t come close than 2m to a tax paperwork or I’ll start panicking :D
Once you get past some turnover (i think it’s 2 million CZK per year–about $100k) you need to use more complex system which requires you to do extra papers/taxes related to VAT, plus there’s more tracking. (You need to track expenses precisely and keep the invoices/bills for some amount of years.) The rules are probably also different for different kinds of corporations, for some regulated trades, etc. For even larger businesses some of these are done half-yearly or quarterly.
Social & health insurance (both of these are mandatory, ie. they are basically taxes) is paid separately from the above (for businesses. for employees this is still done by employers) as advance payment and then balanced based on your reported income. (Then there are several small taxes like public broadcasting, land taxes or city taxes, but those are usually really easy to pay, they are either same per capita, or in case of land taxes you just report your land size and the burreau will compute it for you and send you the bill.
Of course there are also deductions based on whether you have kids, spouse, mortgage, charity gifts, etc.
Similar to ours, but everyone fills out a form (does their taxes) unless you make less than $15k/yr. When you’re hired you fill out a w-4 to say how many dependents you have which determines your withholding. This should work out to make your amount returned or account due in the spring close to 0. Trump’s big tax change that was advertised to give people more money, really just changed these charts so that many people got more money on their paychecks but then had to pay more in the spring.
Anyone who has investments, self employed, or had anything other than a simple W-2 (the form you get from your employer in January that tells your earnings for the year) fills out more and more forms. Each of these forms adds more opportunities to get screwed or to game the system. Deductions for business experiences might include dinners, trips, vehicles, homes/home offices, etc. for some people.
We also pay 7.65% (up to $184k of income per year) into social security and Medicare (a small amount of money and mediocre not free healthcare that you receive after age 65 or if disabled) and employers match a portion of that.
Here’s s pic of our current tax rates …
I’d say because the amount is personnalized to you. “My taxes” are not equal to “your taxes”.
Grammatically you are spot on, numerically you are missing a bit of nuance. In a society where everyone paid the same equal and fair amount, the ills we see simply would not exist.
This is pedantic, but I don’t think an equal tax would be fair at all. I take equal to mean everyone pays the same absolute amount, eg $10 a year. It wouldn’t be fair to make a newborn baby with $0 to their name pay $10. Similarly, it wouldn’t be fair to make a multi billionaire only pay $10, because they relatively cost more and benefit more from the infrastructure, institutions, economy and every other part of society; taxes of course contribute to funding that society. Sorry the paragraph where a sentence might’ve sufficed. Think that all the semantics I’m allowed to argue about on the internet for this week.
Our friend below details this fairly well, but in a society where “my” taxes are a sign of ownership of debt, do you really think that’s healthy? How about the alternative where everyone has the same investment and therefore the same access to public goods and services? Feel free to double down, but I just don’t see the point of people arguing the necessity to own debts incurred on them from a structurally unsound social and economic system. It’s weird and has the aire of Stockholm Syndrome.
I disagree with his point, but to be fair, I think he is envisioning the communist utopia, where everyone has equal access to everything and there is no inequality of ownership. So the baby would have exactly as much as the billionaire (making them no longer a billionaire).
If we had a mandated wage that everyone got, regardless of job, that would mean a flat tax makes sense, in his defense.
Do I think a society where everyone gets paid the same regardless of job would actually function though? No.
Thank you for giving a real world example of a rational human who can disagree with the premise while also understanding its intent and origin. All these other numpties downvoting me didn’t bother to do the 2 minutes of critical thinking, so good on you mate!
Who else’s taxes do you pay?
Are you paying the taxes for everyone?
Or do you only pay the taxes you owe?Income taxes - I do “the taxes” at year end not “my taxes” because we file as married. But when I was single I did “my taxes”
Sales tax, never. That’s just “the sales tax”
Property tax, also I say “the property tax”
I do use “my taxes” or “our taxes” (the collective group of taxpayers) when complaining, like “why are my taxes used to blow up little kids and siphoned into the pockets of people who don’t need the money?” Because it’s money we earned and being used in ways most of us would strongly object to.
I say “my property taxes” because it’s what I individually pay on my individual house, but sales tax is generic and I just say “sales tax”.
Because it’s my money they’re paid from.
You could also class it as a debt in your name.
I’ve paid my debts.
I’ve paid my taxes.you usually go in debt financially from spending on things you actually use
eg: I am in debt regarding to my house, I still have a few years of loan to pay. I was in debt regarding to my car. I am in debt for the camera gear I bought on a 4 month spread.
I do not get to use 90% of the shit my taxes go to. Vast majority of it go to other people, the military, and subsidies for rich people. That’s not a debt, that’s an involutary charity.
I don’t mind the concept of taxes, as I understand why they exist. I just wished they weren’t mostly used to build bombs and make rich people richer.
“Hey, can we give each homeless person $2000? It’ll pull 90% of them out of poverty. Then they’ll become contributors to the tax pool!”
“No, I’d rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hostile architecture and hostile police. Also we pay jails to house and feed them.”
They removed all benches from the bus stops in my town a few months ago.
It’s not like we have a homeless problem in the town. It’s a smaller town on the outskirts of a bunch of larger cities. I don’t think I ever seen one homeless person since I moved here decades ago.
Thanks for making me miserable when i’m waiting for the bus, I’m sure it was worth it you absolute cunts.
Interesting, I’ve never seen the tax part of the money which I’m getting as “my” money, I’m just a steward who takes it and moves it to the owner, I just hold them for practical reasons so that it’s easier to administer it (otherwise you’d need a parallel way of doing it).
Interestingly, in my language, it’s an uncountable noun, thus we say “pay the tax”, even though it contains all the subcategories of the various types of taxes.
That’s an interesting linguistic point - so tax in your language would use “less/more” being uncountable.
Technically, in English, taxes should be fewer/greater (being a countable dollar thing), but we often say “less”. Prescription vs description in action!
That’s right! We say “pay more/less tax” and “have you declared the tax?”, for instance. Although, I am not speaking from a standardized or school grammar perspective. This is just how I - as a native speaker - would use our equivalent of the word “tax”. This brings me back HARD. To times when I used to join various panel discussions to fiercly defend the/my stance on “correct language” - my vague stance being that the ruling classes need to let the actual spoken word and its usage to be reflected back into the academic discourse. End of off topic discussion.
deleted by creator
Language differences always have deep cultural explanations and aren’t just due to minor historical contingencies. Once a language change has locked into place, the associated cultural connection infects future users.
Next up: Why do Americans say things like “I wash my hands” while Spanish speakers say “Lavo los manos” (meaning wash the hands)? Probably something to do with end-stage capitalism and ownership.
