In every country, people are always legally ordered to pay their taxes properly. A large number of taxpayers often become very suspicious of where their tax contributions usually go. Often, they think that their hard-earned money is simply stolen by the government. Well of course, that’s not really true. The money collected from taxes will surely facilitate certain countries to become socio-politically stable and will assist the government in providing basic services to its citizens.
Below are some of the basic services provided by the government to the people using the money they pay for their taxes:
• First on the list are public services. Public services are the government’s obligations, such as maintaining street cleanliness, providing street lighting, disposing of garbage regularly, conducting water treatment, and maintaining the cleanliness of public parks. This activity, of course, requires a large amount of funds.
• Other government services that are the main priority are health services. More or less, all governments around the world provide their citizens with subsidized or completely free healthcare services to their citizens. These health services include preventive immunization shots, disaster relief medical assistance, and more. All of these health services are financed by taxes paid by the community.
• The third is infrastructure projects. Tax money donated by the public is mostly used for the construction of buildings, roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure projects that are made available to the general public. It is actually a determining factor that a particular country is highly developed.
• Another important government service where tax money is used is public safety and security. Public money collected from the taxes they pay is usually allocated to the police and firefighters. Also, tax money adds to the funds that are definitely important to maintain defense forces (army, navy and air force) and buy firearms for them.
• Other services are emergency assistance, elections, maintenance of historical monuments, government assistance, running of several government agencies such as departments of agriculture, commerce, energy, city development, treasury, judiciary, departments of motor vehicles and many others.
Now you know where our tax money goes and it’s never in the pockets of officials. If citizens have to pay for the services they need, then there’s no way they can afford it. For example, if you want to go from one city to another, can you afford to build a road connecting the two cities? Of course you can’t. For that reason, we pay taxes for government services and then benefit from these services in their entirety.