If you are a small business owner who pays retail, it is likely that you pay some form of sales tax or VAT (value added tax). Customers grown about the cost, particularly on high ticket items. Online merchants fight to keep governments from taxing online sales. And the retailer is buried under one more layer of bureaucracy.
Benjamin Franklin had it right — there are no guarantees except for death and taxes.
And, like most things in life, your attitude towards something changes your perspective totally.
When sales taxes first started being imposed (back when dinosaurs and baby boomers first walked the earth), the idea was that the additional tax would help our schools. It was deemed a more “equitable” tax. If you could afford to buy something, the reasoning went, you could afford to fork out a little extra. In most cases, states in the US only taxed non-necessities. (I was 16 when I first realized governments were overrun with men. A new sales clerk in the local New Jersey A&P, it bugged me that toilet paper was deemed a “necessity,” while menstrual pads were not!)
Hundreds of propositions later (particularly here in California), it’s difficult to tell exactly what the sales tax is used for. And yet, the concept of any tax is pretty much the same. Taxes are supposed to be used for the common good. They are supposed to pay for roads, common protection from marauding lions, tigers and bears of the animal and human variety, and care for the very young and very old.
Have we lost our way? Probably. Differing opinions and turf wars have made the tax code almost impenetrable. (I gave up doing my own taxes years ago.) And yet, if we change our attitude and realize that the extra we are paying does help us all out with roads, schools and air traffic controllers, then it feels less onerous.
One more thing we can do, ladies. We can ask our local representative just how our taxes are used in our local governments. Then get them to clean the mess they’ve made in the house.
Your thoughts? Leave a comment below and tell me how you feel!
