A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I’m not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I’m just a working class person, I don’t have any connections … Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I’m so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they’ll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our ‘strategic highway’ systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don’t mind paying but the service sucks 😭
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they’d never bite.
Amazon’s semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it’s not smart to avoid taxes, that’s bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
Wear and tear on roads is paid for via taxes on fuel, so Amazon does indeed pay for wear and tear on roads.
This is also why lawmakers are looking at taxing EVs per mile driven.
This is a bit dated but shows that 41% of road upkeep on average is paid for by gas taxes (and other fees). So yes while they may have some tax paid on fuel (that they have likely negotiated down via bulk purchase), they’re not even paying for half on average.
Edit - just to include given we’ve seen landmark inflation over the last few years it’s likely the share of taxes on upkeep has gone down.