Same for Russia. Your employer do taxes on income you receive and send them themselves, your seller shows a price already including taxes - and you aren’t involved at all. Property taxes are paid by individuals tho, but you’d get a bill according to what the state thinks you owe once a year. It kinda works.
On the other hand, it makes people even less aware where government gets it’s money and less interested in what then it spends them on.
You earn just 100-x% off your paycheck, every end product is x% more expensive in a store, and it’s production and delivery also add x% each time money are transferred between two parties in the process, with special taxes and conditions applied if relevant.
It’s another brick for a mindset perceiving the government as some divine power that delivers and demands, that we don’t usually question, even if it funds a war with another country when it can’t win a war against it’s own shitty roads, poverty, corruption and so on - we don’t see bad roads as a direct misuse of our own money, but some ill-doing of individual beaurocrats or contractors that we can’t affect, it just happens.
There, the comfort of easy taxes, put onto monetary illiteracy, plays it’s role in supporting an authoritarian mythology.
Same for Russia. Your employer do taxes on income you receive and send them themselves, your seller shows a price already including taxes - and you aren’t involved at all. Property taxes are paid by individuals tho, but you’d get a bill according to what the state thinks you owe once a year. It kinda works.
On the other hand, it makes people even less aware where government gets it’s money and less interested in what then it spends them on.
You earn just 100-x% off your paycheck, every end product is x% more expensive in a store, and it’s production and delivery also add x% each time money are transferred between two parties in the process, with special taxes and conditions applied if relevant.
It’s another brick for a mindset perceiving the government as some divine power that delivers and demands, that we don’t usually question, even if it funds a war with another country when it can’t win a war against it’s own shitty roads, poverty, corruption and so on - we don’t see bad roads as a direct misuse of our own money, but some ill-doing of individual beaurocrats or contractors that we can’t affect, it just happens.
There, the comfort of easy taxes, put onto monetary illiteracy, plays it’s role in supporting an authoritarian mythology.