5 ms·
I agree. As someone from a poor family, never received inheritance of any kind, and now (40 years old) makes +/- $1M per year, I climbed through every 'tax bra
by microdrum 5y ago
I agree.
As someone from a poor family, never received inheritance of any kind, and now (40 years old) makes +/- $1M per year, I climbed through every 'tax bracket'. The income tax system is absolutely designed to make it very hard to move through working class into middle class, and then from middle class to upper middle class.
Once you have escape velocity, you've got room to move with debt facilities and other options. Everyone wants to give you free, high quality banking services. It gets easier. But moving from, say $70K to $500K is very very hard specifically because of taxes.
For a very long time, the cumulative sum of taxes I'd paid were more than the money I actually had in my account, to invest and pay for things.
Ted Cruz was right, taxes should fit on a postcard for everyone.
And no, unrealized investments shouldn't be taxed and no one except do-nothing journalists are surprised to learn that they aren't - this ProPublica article is really the definition of fake news.
Actually let me just say what it is: propaganda leaked in order to build support for the president's tax increases, which are a very bad idea.
- cycomanic 5y agoThat you consider yourself upper middle class with an income of 1M a year already says a lot about how skewed your view is (not surprising there was some article on HN recently about research showing that the rich and the poor consider themselves middle class both). Sure you are not a billionaire but you are not middle class anymore, you earn 30 times the median income in the US. Now comparing yourself with the superrich might make you think you're not that rich, but you are.
- rllearneratwork 5y agohave you heard about different cost of living in different places? What if the person plans to fund himself/herself in the retirement and pay for kids college rather than expecting all that "for free" from the government?
- ryandrake 5y agoThere is no metro region on Earth where $1M/year can be considered middle class.
- askafriend 5y agoI'd say in SF, you need 500k to be reasonably middle/upper-middle class if you have kids (let's say 2).
- rllearneratwork 5y ago1M/year is roughly 500K after taxes in Bay Area. Starter house is bad school district (means you need to pay 25K-45K per year per kid for private school) is over 1M.
- ryandrake 5y agoSure, but a 1M mortgage is about 50K a year at today's rates. Let's say 30K for home upkeep, 10K to keep a car on the road, 10K for utilities, 20K for food and dining. So 500K after tax - 90K private school for two kids - 50K mortgage payment - 30K - 10K - 10K - 20K = 290K in totally disposable post-tax income. Still not even remotely close to middle class.
- rllearneratwork 5y agosure 1M is OK in SF Bay area (you need to plan for retirement too). But even based on your calculations suddenly 500K is not enough to allow a middle class lifestyle.
- cycomanic 5y agoA typical multiplier for house price and before tax income is 6. So you are saying a 1M house, but for 1M yearly income we should be taking about 6M house (assuming the spouse is not working). Now I definitely wouldn't call a 6M house middle class.
- omgwtfbbq 5y agoEat the rich bitch.