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I could be wrong but that blame will still be partially on this vague and seemingly bias non-profit. Does federal income tax include or not include FICA? Presu

I could be wrong but that blame will still be partially on this vague and seemingly bias non-profit. Does federal income tax include or not include FICA? Presumably not. In which case the bottom 90%+ are paying some number of 10-15% more per year. Then the top few percent are paying less extra until you get to the top 1% and beyond where they are paying a fraction extra. That tax alone completely invalidates the article and makes it seem incredibly biased.

willcipriano 6y ago
If you have better numbers I'd like to see them. 24% didn't seem right to me so I wanted to see where that figure came from. Low income households pay negative federal income tax rates (7.65% for FICA included) after the earned income credit is applied. You can make a case that the 7.65% paid by the employer also lowers wages, but if you want to discuss second order effects like that you have to also get into the weeds that taxes on corporations increase the costs of goods and and are a indirect tax on consumers. Calculating the actual rate is almost impossible as you'd need to factor in property taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, costs involved in vehicle registration and other permits and so on. Even then people disagree on what a is a tax and what isn't and argue that some of those things shouldn't be included. For example, the individual mandate in the affordable care act levied what was called a fine to people who did not have health insurance the previous year (Individual Shared Responsibility Payment) but in real terms this wasn't very different than a tax and was collected by the IRS. Similarly, some would claim Social Security and Medicare payments are not taxes due to the fact that those programs directly provide services to the party who paid into them. This is also the justification for phasing them out over certain income thresholds as after you have contributed a certain amount to the program you are "paid up" as it were. My point is in order to discuss this first we must agree on what constitutes a tax in the first place and that is much easier said than done. If we take the all non voluntary payments to any government and their second order effects route we are probably talking about a rate of over 50% on average, however under that same definition Facebook is paying much more than 4%.

willcipriano 6y ago

If you have better numbers I'd like to see them. 24% didn't seem right to me so I wanted to see where that figure came from. Low income households pay negative federal income tax rates (7.65% for FICA included) after the earned income credit is applied. You can make a case that the 7.65% paid by the employer also lowers wages, but if you want to discuss second order effects like that you have to also get into the weeds that taxes on corporations increase the costs of goods and and are a indirect tax on consumers. Calculating the actual rate is almost impossible as you'd need to factor in property taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, costs involved in vehicle registration and other permits and so on. Even then people disagree on what a is a tax and what isn't and argue that some of those things shouldn't be included. For example, the individual mandate in the affordable care act levied what was called a fine to people who did not have health insurance the previous year (Individual Shared Responsibility Payment) but in real terms this wasn't very different than a tax and was collected by the IRS. Similarly, some would claim Social Security and Medicare payments are not taxes due to the fact that those programs directly provide services to the party who paid into them. This is also the justification for phasing them out over certain income thresholds as after you have contributed a certain amount to the program you are "paid up" as it were. My point is in order to discuss this first we must agree on what constitutes a tax in the first place and that is much easier said than done. If we take the all non voluntary payments to any government and their second order effects route we are probably talking about a rate of over 50% on average, however under that same definition Facebook is paying much more than 4%.