astralika:

snommelp:

Not wanting to sound like I’m shaming anyone who doesn’t understand the US tax code, but y’all need to know, anyone who claims that rich or marginally rich people pay over half of their income in taxes is full of shit.

Firstly, because the highest tax bracket is 39.6%, which you might be able to tell is less than 50%.

But second, because the US tax system uses graduated brackets. No matter how much you make, the first $9275 is taxes at 10%. If you made $10K in 2016, a whole $725 is taxes at the second tax bracket of 15%. If you make the median US income of $51,939 then you’re still going to have $9275 taxed at 10%, and then $28375 at 15%, and the remaining $14,289 at 25%. If you know anything about math, you can probably tell that this means, even though your tax bracket is 25%, you’re not actually being taxed at 25%. At that median income, your real tax percentage is actually 16.86%

And thirdly, this is all based on normal income. Long term capital gains, i.e. the biggest source of income for affluent Americans, are taxed at a substantially lower rate.

So once again, no shame if you don’t understand the tax code and think it’s too complicated for you to get. But I can 100% guarantee that anyone complaining about the rich paying “too much” in taxes is either straight up lying, or manipulating their data so much that it no longer even bears a passing resemblance to the truth.

I was vaguely aware of point 2, wasn’t as aware of point 3!

Thank you for this post, OP