Hold up: the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, TABOR, can mean different things depending on the context. Why can’t lawmakers be more creative with names? Somebody send a carmaker over there.
Anywho, one of the TABORs is under the IRS. The IRS has a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, defining all of your rights as a U.S. taxpayer. You have the right to be informed about IRS decisions about your taxes, the right to dispute and appeal IRS decisions, the right for the IRS to not be a d*#% during audits...things like that. This TABOR was passed into law by Congress in the 1980s, and updated in 1996, so it’s the law...not just the IRS being nice.
The more controversial type of TABOR is the one that limits a government’s power to tax their people, oftentimes based on measures like inflation and population...a fan favorite of libertarians and conservatives.
This isn’t too common, but Colorado is known for taking the daring TABOR plunge. While Oregon, Nebraska, and Maine all toyed with a Taxpayer Bill of Rights to put a cap on the states’ ability to tax its people, none of them took the jump.
Colorado is the lone weirdo to this day. Advocates are happy they get to keep their money, and hope that the bureaucrats are being more efficient with what they have. Meanwhile, critics point out that Colorado is the 48th state for higher education spending and 44th in road repair spending, which means TABOR could be hurting the economy more than it’s helping.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: Why Do Taxes Exist?137 Views
Why do taxes exist and notice we're saying that with a kind of a whiny tone
alright well someone has to pay for this and this and this and this yep there are [Hand pointing to a road, a school, a plane and a park]
a bunch of different types of taxes in each of them carries a different purpose
yeah Road taxes get paid in large part out of
the gasoline you buy you got to pay for the building and maintaining of potholes [Car drives into a pothole]
right and that makes sense if you drive a car you use the roads more so you
should pay more for its use that's like a use tax get it cleverly named if for [Price for federal tax per gallon and state tax per gallon]
when you own a home you'll pay real estate tax and for the most part that
tax is designated to pay schools all right well but like everything [Hand holding money from real estate tax to pay for schools]
government related nothing is simple in America the federal government has kind
of a matching program for schools where they pay for a portion of the education
cost based on various factors and you don't want us to get into that in the [complicated equation on chalkboard]
video all right well the largest taxes most people pay are income taxes and
those generally pay for the government to you know govern us if a couple made a
hundred grand jointly in California last year they'd pay around thirty [A couple stood together in their home]
thirty-five grand in taxes that money covers things like shiny new airplanes
to force the mean countries to play nice in the schoolyard it covers repairs to
crumbling bridges and tunnels across the country it covers public protective [Bridges crumbling]
services like police and fire department people
it covers libraries and public parks, well don't feel like you're getting your
money's worth these days if you're ever not feeling that you can always move to [Woman chased from a park by a tiger]
the Ukraine discounts on citizenship they're everywhere
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