>Furthermore those claims that cry about 50% of people not paying taxes ignore the fact that they are indeed paying, albeit indirectly thru highly underpaid jobs which for some here its they fault for they do not work hard enough...

These are not as much due to taxes, but rather to heavy skimming by the upper 1% - all the money that goes into advertising, lawyers, fancy office buildings, outsourced everything (from janitorial services to guards to consultants for finding consultants), interests, gambling on the Wall street, butt warmers in the cars etc etc has to come from somewhere.

But yes, when we talk about flat tax rate, we generally talk only about the personal income tax and largely ignore other taxes. There are taxes that the employer pays on top of what we see on the pay slip, retail taxes, somewhere even wholesale taxes, excise taxes, property taxes... And then there are the invisible taxes, that we usually don't count at all, but keep paying them - the cost of paperwork, of various inspections, processing fees, service charges, tips, licenses, per transaction costs. Which was an interesting source of invisible inflation in Sloba's times - when you couldn't exactly pinpoint what's it that's more expensive, because you'd be looking at the things you buy. It was the nothings that you buy that were popping up everywhere: a fee to leave the country, a fee to get a copy of your birth certificate, the invention of birth certificate which was valid only six months (as if you could change your mind and choose not be born after that time).

A story I heard from a friend: he had two accounts at a bank, one for dinars and one for foreign currency. He never had a single dinar on the first one. Then he was about 20 dinars in the red on the first one, and went to the bank to see how could that happen. They established an algorithm, whereby they will send warnings to anyone who was in the red, by first debiting the printing and mailing fee for the warning, then calculating the total.