It’s Strange But I Want To Pay Taxes To My Tax Inefficient Country

I love simplicity and progress. I thrive in those environments. When people talk about the dangers of workaholism I secretly hope none of that is true because it is only through work that I find channels to organize my life and get some worthwhile meaning out of it.

This desire for progress, simple living, and using work to attain those ideals is also a projection I sometimes wish for people I come across every day. Most people don’t need half the things they have half as much as they would need simplicity. — Am not high, I just rewatched the hobbit. Don’t ask me what half of this paragraph means.

When I look at the country in which I was born, simple living is a myth unless you want to use that term to sugarcoat the definition of poverty.

I am not talking about living on less than $2.82/day on a family of 10 people when am talking about simple living. There is nothing simple about sharing $2.82 between 10 people.

What exists here is sacrificial living or sometimes survival living when things get really bad.

Simple living on the other hand looks something similar to having options. Through these, you can choose and have some form of control over your life. That is not the reality of many people in my country as they are so preoccupied with survival living.

The unspoken agreements and the nature of lives in countries like mine are mostly about dominantly having a subsistence economy.

Everyone for themselves ironically rings true when you talk about no one for themselves. There is a funny adage that mocks the motto on the court of arms here which goes something like this.

“For God and My Stomach”

Walk around the streets and find that almost everyone is a small business owner. The small business owner part is amazing but the subsistence model of it all makes it messy and undesirable.

People are predatory, manipulative, and inconsiderate to make their small businesses. This doesn’t stop with business alone. The subsistence nature of the economy also weaves into people’s livelihoods. Relationships are very transactional and if you can’t transact, even your own parent could become passive-aggressive at the very least.

I am lucky to have a father who didn’t ever treat me like that but I have other family members who have.

When I look at other countries, particularly the developed nations, it is hard not to notice that they all once had subsistence living as the major defining model of their economies. I don’t think it is a coincidence that during this time, that is also when their economies were fragile and poor.

Having an organized consolidation of resources also coincided with a lot of robust growth to the realities we now know as developed. I am not saying that they do not have the same predatory, manipulative, and inconsiderate players. They do. Every economy does.

It is not a binary comparison of whether or not these inefficiencies exist. These inefficiencies exist on a spectrum. When you are measuring faith in your government, it is not whether or not you have faith in it. It is about finding to what extent you have faith in it. The same is true for subsistence economies.

Every economy has subsistence players but the issue is to what extent those players exist. The subsistence model dominates in poor economies around the world and it is almost nonexistent in developed nations.

I say almost non-existent because every player in those developed economies contributes to the general fund. You have to do it or else you go to jail. That means that even those who have subsistence livelihoods in those developed economies kind of live a modified form of subsistence living. One that has supports and crutches to get you through the tough times.

This is not the subsistence living I am talking about. The one I am talking about has no crutches or supports of any kind. You truly have to support yourself at a minimal level and no government will help you through it unless the elections are around the corner and they want to influence your vote with one kilogram of sugar and a bar of soap. This is what happens in countries like mine.

It is a truly “For God and my stomach” type situation.

When you look at these people, they are also the most hardworking individuals. Imagine cultivating an acre of land by hand and hoe, planting cassava on that entire plot still single-handedly, and then at the time of harvest, you only expect to get $100–$150 for the entire harvest if it is a good yield. Someone makes more than that on a single few-minute consultation in a developed economy but it takes months for another to make it in a poor nation.

Even if a poor country could somehow eliminate corruption entirely but retain its subsistence model as the dominant function of the economy, the money that the country produces could never fully get that economy to a developed level.

Public infrastructure that creates ideal environments for simple living and progress is funded by consolidated resources like taxes. If structures do not exist, there is no way any single individual is going to take them on alone.

It is just not economically sensible nor is it possible unless you own the entire economy which of course is not only stupid but also can’t happen when everyone is on subsistence living.

The way our economies are organized therefore make it necessary for funds like taxes to exist as well as to be effectively used in the country’s development.

Again I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the happiest and most developed countries also have some of the highest taxes and most efficient use of the tax funds.

When I look at myself, for instance, I pay an international withholding tax of about 30% on most of my businesses. Some of them pay nothing. For those that I pay taxes, I am not an expert in international affairs but I doubt whether those taxes benefit me or my country. I am thinking that those taxes go to the country in which those businesses are located.

For those that I don’t pay taxes on, I keep wondering to whom I should pay and by how much.

I hate seeing my income dip as a result of fees and taxes but when it’s within reason, I am happy to pay them because I know they benefit not just me but a lot of people who may not be as lucky as I am to have an income.

I know that paying my taxes and having them properly utilized will help children to have a childhood that they can enjoy and reminisce over when they are older instead of having to slave away trying to make ends meet.

I know that paying my taxes and having them properly utilized will grant me the time to have a simple living and progress in pursuing things I care about.

These are stories I tell myself but I know that there is some truth to them.

If everyone is trying to fend for themselves in the true sense of the word as it is in countries like mine, development is really hard and people may have to resort to unimaginable actions to survive.

Most of my income is taxed by someone but I doubt whether it ever benefits me beyond having the channel that brought in that income. I guess that is important too but I would also love to see it do more than that. 30% can go a long way and it is too much still.

In my country, most people do not pay taxes unless they have a registered business that has to get audited by the central bank frequently. Actually, if you have a business and the authorities come knocking, I have seen people who pay a fraction in bribes to the officials so that they let them off the hook.

I want to believe that most employees of these businesses pay taxes through their employers but that is a stretch of optimism my mind struggles to accept.

Having a subsistence economy means that we have an unhealthy dependency on grants and loans to fund our public infrastructure not to mention that those people who receive these grants and loans often misuse them and get the country into more trouble. Can you imagine China confiscating your airport because your country couldn’t pay back a few million dollars? How pathetic!!!

This miserable inadequacy arises from the fact that everyone wants to benefit from an economy without putting anything into it. All professions rise in demand with the nature of how proportional those careers can help people find ways of limiting their input in the economies. Lawyers for example will be valuable if they can figure out how to get a legal businessman out of trouble for not paying taxes or accountants who help their businesses minimize taxes.

It’s true that everyone has to protect what they make and not pay more than necessary but paying nothing at all never does good for anyone.

I keep hoping that maybe one day, we can have efficient tax funds which can benefit the entire public so that I can pursue my ideals of simple living and progress with less guilt.