4 ms·

This is exactly correct. That said, I'm quite surprised how many people struggle to understand how progressive tax bands/brackets work. It maybe doesn't help th

• Terr_ 1y ago
  > portray them dishonestly Tangentially, the same motivated-disinformation occurs with Social Security. It's best-understood as an insurance-policy (OASDI is literally named that way) against dying poor and old/orphaned/disabled. With an insurance policy, it's normal for my month's premium to be spent on somebody else's current tragedy, it's normal for me to expect no cash if the Bad Thing never actually happens to me, and it's normal that there's no asset for me to pass on to my heirs. However wall-street bankers can't make tons of profits competing under that model, so instead they try to trick citizens into misunderstanding what the model is. They want people to think it's a government-managed investment account instead, where every person is filling an individual bucket of "their" money that will someday be tipped back out for them. With this deception, their job is much easier: They just need to say that they'll be a nicer manager of the accounts than the government is, because they'll give you more choices for managing "your" money. It's dishonest because the two things are fundamentally different in how they work and what they're good for.