Posted by Caliber on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @ 10:19pm
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I've actually spent time thinking about that and the only thing I can come up with is that it's easier. Rather than having to do all this special stuff with payroll, just charge everyone according to one structure with all of its existing flaws. It makes it easy they to also add exceptions, such as making all combat-pay or hazard-pay tax free.

While I'm sure there is some perfectly illogical incomprehensible reason, I don't think ease is it. The reason I say this is that when we deploy to hazardous duty zones, we drop to a tax free status automatically. That implies that there is already a mechanism in place to do exactly that. With up to 33% of the force deployed at any given time these days, your rational, though perfectly logical, wouldn't apply, since you are portioning a section of your troops already, thereby complicating things further. The universe is spiraling towards order :o

I did hear once that it was an issue of apportioning. Since only a part of our taxes go to defense and a part goes to various government agencies (and other governmental money pots) that budgeting requires we all pay our chunk and then retrieve our dough from the correct pot-o-money. Being the non-finance guy, I can't say, but maybe that makes it more clear for you and you can fill us in...

Posted by voltaic on Friday January 28, 2011 @ 08:44am
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I did hear once that it was an issue of apportioning. Since only a part of our taxes go to defense and a part goes to various government agencies (and other governmental money pots) that budgeting requires we all pay our chunk and then retrieve our dough from the correct pot-o-money. Being the non-finance guy, I can't say, but maybe that makes it more clear for you and you can fill us in...

That makes total sense, actually.

Posted by Caliber on Saturday January 29, 2011 @ 05:22pm
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I did hear once that it was an issue of apportioning. Since only a part of our taxes go to defense and a part goes to various government agencies (and other governmental money pots) that budgeting requires we all pay our chunk and then retrieve our dough from the correct pot-o-money. Being the non-finance guy, I can't say, but maybe that makes it more clear for you and you can fill us in...

That makes total sense, actually.

I'm glad, but id still rather not pay taxes

Posted by rub on Monday January 24, 2011 @ 03:06pm
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I've actually spent time thinking about that and the only thing I can come up with is that it's easier. Rather than having to do all this special stuff with payroll, just charge everyone according to one structure with all of its existing flaws. It makes it easy they to also add exceptions, such as making all combat-pay or hazard-pay tax free.

I would be inclined to agree with you if the tax code wasn't already a gigantic complicated mess. I don't think tossing in a few extra provisions would make it that much more complicated.

Posted by voltaic on Friday January 28, 2011 @ 08:46am
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I would be inclined to agree with you if the tax code wasn't already a gigantic complicated mess. I don't think tossing in a few extra provisions would make it that much more complicated.

True also, but people get all bleary-eyed when "the troops" are mentioned. Politicians use them to score political points all the time. But the idea of apportionment (money is fungible, etc) Caliber mentioned above makes the most sense to me.