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Monday, July 12, 2010
News Too many owe too much, state suffers
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:03 PM
All kinds of people don't pay their taxes.
This year, Bob Hupman has plenty of company.
The former Mebane town councilman owes the state of North Carolina $2.2 million in unpaid taxes. He tops a list of tax delinquents who owe the state $841 million - a 67 percent jump from a year ago.
The delinquencies exceed the $800 million shortfall N.C. lawmakers faced in passing the state's new $18.9 billion budget last month.
"I didn't realize it was that high," says Rep. Paul Luebke, a Durham Democrat who chairs the House Finance Committee. "It's definitely money that we could use."
Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Jim Morrill, here.
When people — especially en masse — don't pay their taxes, we all suffer.
What do our taxes pay for? Glad you asked, because I suspect most people don't really know.
Unfortunately, I can't answer that question for you. There's a whole lot of noise about the long, long, long list of taxes we have to pay, but figuring out how your tax dollar breaks down for different services (like education) or accommodations (like roads) or pay checks (like for our leaders) is difficult to figure out.
This is a big fail for local, state and federal governments. If they want more buy in, they should do a better job explaining why we need to pay our taxes.
Now, we all know taxes are necessary if you want infrastructure and a healthy, educated population. And, the people on the North Carolina Department of Revenue's 45- page delinquency"most wanted" list know our state is suffering financially as well as anyone else, especially the politicians on the list.
I am in no way excusing their behavior. At the same time, I think our government needs to do a better job explaining why taxes are a necessary part of American citizenship.
Even Disney used to try to explain ...
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