Taxes

It is interesting to take a look at taxes in our country. First off I'm just one of those average Joes that they keep talking about and I often wonder that for what I pay in income taxes why so many complain about the tax issue. No one wants to give up any of their hard earned money, but when you look around at our infrastructure that we enjoy and the costs of that infrastructure... you wonder at what we get for the small amount we pay. From the Bridges, Highways, Parks, Courts, Ports, Airports, and Military down to the everyday items like the street lights that turn on every night, highway markers, gutters, fisheries, forest rangers, you name it... It is phenomenal. There is an interesting web sites where you can compare the taxes you would pay under Obama and McCain... one of these is... http://www.yourmoneypage.com/campaign2008/form_1040.php I made 53,000 and took the average deductions of a retiree, I'd pay $1000 more than I would under John McCain. Here are a couple of more websights that give graphs of Corporate taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg I wrote a question on Yahoo Answers and these are some of the questions that I asked there.... I was looking at the Corporate tax rates (US @ 38 percent) to try and understand the issues of having higher corporate tax rates... It is my understanding that although our tax rates are high we also have many tax loop holes and breaks that corporations are able to take advantage of that are not reflected in this chart. Is that true? Also, Corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer and this would mean that these taxes are also passed on to exported products. The entire world pays our taxes through corporate taxes? I find it true that corporate taxes are high, but I also see that the majority of debt incurred by the country in the last 8 years wound up as profits in corporate bank accounts. Likewise shouldn't the rich and execs who benefited individually the most from the debt incurred have to pay it back? Certainly leveraging the little guy doesn't make much sense since if you take it away from the majority of consumers then they can not purchase product? As I was an Aircraft mechanic for 35 years and retired only to get screwed by my airline, please keep your answer on a plain the I can understand. Note that I feel that it was deregulation of my industry that has created the instability of the industry in the last in the last 20 some odd years, and I feel that you can't play a game on a field with no lines and regulation gives corporations those lines? Wall Street should have regulation. It was interesting to note that our personal income tax rates were lower than most countries and that lowered corporate taxes would probably elevate the income taxes of the citizenry. Some one has to pay them for the infrastructure we enjoy. Whats your take.