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Comment by powerslacker | Hacker News Reader

Income tax definitely disincentives work. Source: my life. In the current economic situation I could easily take on another 40/hour a week job. If I do that I only get to keep just over half of the additional pay my extra job would supply. It's not worth my time to work for half my 'hourly rate'. So now there's an extra job vacancy.

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Is it really the tax though? It sounds like you have enough money where the utility of extra money is reduced and you would rather do other things with your time. Can you honestly say that you would work 80 hr per week even at full rate? Now let's also consider that your first 40 your job would be full rate too, also providing less incentive for more needing more money.

Which is normally a good thing. Because we need more people employed as opposed to one person with 2x income

>>>Because we need more people employed as opposed to one person with 2x income

To me that just suggests we have a massive over-supply of labor. Whether labor is employed or not, it comes with a non-zero resource maintenance cost, which exacerbates things like climate risk, etc. Setting tax policies in such a way to maximize the number of meatbags assembling widgets strikes me as directing us towards an erroneous local maximum. Feeding fewer mouths, but doubling the resource allocations to each would be preferred.

How are you going to cull all those extra months?

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