Quote Originally Posted by Catgrrl View Post
Pretty much.

There is a real estate tax, based on the value of your home. In my area, it is $0.99 per $1000. So if you have a $200,000 home, you are paying just under $2000 annually. And ya, it's meant to go towards government services. Paying for local government employees, schools, safety, etc.

Here we also have to pay personal property tax on our cars, supposedly to help pay for the roads we use. Considering the conditions of our road (horrible), I can assume that it hasn't actually being going towards that but to some other mysterious place.
Yeah the idea that a tax is "for" something is an ideal that never seemed to get through to the Internal Revenue folks.

Politician "This tax is for the roads"
Taxpayer "OK at least we'll get better roads."
Tax Department "Well you see the road tax goes into internal revenue and then after that the system takes over and we're not allowed to question the system because we are part of the system and if we were to question the system....well did you see what happened to Agent Smith in the Matrix? Best not to risk it."
Taxpayer "Excuse me Mr politician but could you please find out where the road tax money went, we're driving on the bones of immigrant workers down her."
Politician "The Democrats* took the money, vote us in at the next election and we'll fix it." *or Republicans
etc