Idk where you get your data, but that slice of earners you mention pays maybe 20% of the taxes In This country, tops (assuming you mean USA).
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of-the-latest-federal-inco...
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of-the-latest-federal-inco...
My turn: do you expect more than half of all households in America to be paying no federal income tax at all?
Seems like instead of collecting $x amount of tax from them in order to give it back in benefits, we could just not have them pay tax (which is the case currently).
The real answer is - raise their wages, and then they will be paying more in federal taxes (just like the upper quartiles are).
USA lower tier professionals (Doctors, Lawyers, Programmers, have a anticompetitive racket - they should all get a 20-30% net haircut in salary, tech should be regulated, we should increase admission to med-school and allow nurse practitioners to serve as doctors, etc.). I say this as someone who benefits greatly from the current system, but also realizes how fucked up it is.
Finance people should be taxed out the wazoo - watching stocks tick up and down on the market is a waste of time and most of them defraud people anyway, estate and wealth tax should be a thing, if they try to denounce citizenship to get away, immediate tax of 50% of [unrealized] profits (we currently do 20%).
Even that wouldn't get us back to how things were in the 1960s, but it would at least be closer, and probably makes things better in the mean time.
Programmers get paid a lot because the market is extremely competitive. Doctors get paid a lot because healthcare in the US is essentially one massive cartel and incredibly inefficient as a result. In most countries, doctors and programmers make similar salaries.
I have never seen him produce a working program in any dot net language, or for that matter any procedural language except maybe visual basic for applications (excel macros maybe). I think he tried to learn php but gave it up. He also calls himself a software engineer. He makes some good money tho, he's in management.
I rarely see this with other engineering disciplines. Its always the computer programmers lol
Just 2 cents from the peanut gallery!
I don’t really care what you call me but I will call myself a software engineer because I have a depth of understanding in how to solve problems with software in a consistent way. I’ve always had an engineering mindset, I grew up in a family of engineers. It’s just the term I prefer.
Median income tax is about 10k on 65k of income so people in the bottom 50% pay between 0 and 10k on between 0 and 65k of income.
If you’re earning 200k or so you pay a similar amount of tax on the first 65k of your income.
But yes, you pay more tax on the extra 135k you’re making. But that’s okay, because you’re making an extra 135k. You can afford it.
$65K is an average household income, but there's no way that the average household is paying $10K in federal income tax, that's laugh-out-loud far of the mark.
Let's just say that's a couple married-filing-jointly.
In 2020, you'd take first of all a $24,800 basic deduction. Then you'd pay $4,429 in income tax on the $40,200 taxable income.
If you had two kids, you'd take two Child Tax Credits for $2,000 each and pay $429 in federal income tax.
An average household with two kids pays essentially no federal income tax in 2020.
Even in the absolute worst-case, a single filer pays no more than ~$7,400 on $65,000 of income.
In 2021, thanks to the increase in the Child Tax Credit ($3000 per child or more younger children), the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the average household will pay no federal income tax at all on income under $75,000 per year.
Also as grandparent mentioned, you pay exactly the same amount of taxes on your first $65K as the person making $65K does.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/o...
Chill.
It's banks and REIT's and corporations and foreign investors buying up houses, not poor people.
The majority of money printed was loaned out to banks and other institutions, which promptly put that money back into the stock market and other investments.
Think about it this way. Would you rather have your investments crash and pay the same taxes, or take the tax increase and also have your investments go up? If you would prefer the second, you benefited from the government's actions.
In fact, I feel the lower class were the ones that the government took from, in the form of impending inflation.