Federal 25%(over 34k), Medicare 15.3% (below ~120k cutoff), Medicare 2.9%, Virginia 5.75% (over 17k /year). Now many people get tax breaks for various things but 50% income tax rate is fairly common for the upper middle class without much in the way of a safety net or public heath care.
I'd also push back on "not much in the way of a safety net". I'd like universal single-payer health care, but in the meantime it's worth remembering (a) once you hit retirement age, you very much do get public health care, and (b) retirement age is when you're most likely to incur medical expenses.
The problem is that salaries in DC aren't double Austin.. they're more like 1.3-1.5x.
Also, once you're about the 50k threshold for income, some of those deductions - like for student loans - start decreasing and disappear.
The only deductions I mentioned --- mortgage interest and state taxes --- don't vanish at $50k.
Higher taxes because I choose to pay other people for housing for the rest of my life? Huh?
You are free to disagree at length with both of those beliefs and I won't fault you for doing so, except that if the best argument you can muster is "no fair, I just want to rent" I may roll my eyes.
But the thing I really wanted to point out is, there are 104905480 things we can debate on HN where a change of perspective might be productive. This isn't one of them; the mortgage interest tax deduction is a psychological pillar of the middle class of the US and eliminating it would be painfully disruptive to huge numbers of voters.
Narcotics will be decriminalized nationwide before we lose deductible mortgage interest, is my prediction. People have strong feelings about drugs, too, but the decision to legalize them or not doesn't change whether they can still afford the cable bill.
This is fundamentally an issue of the tax code, once again, favoring those who are well off while disadvantaging those who are not.
If that doesn't concern you, then so be it.
Hopefully the mortgage interest deduction will go the way of ethanol subsidies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Interest_Relief_At_So...
As tptacek pointed out you are ignoring that the state tax is federally deductible and that the income tax rate at the 25% bracket is the marginal rate.
At that income level (around 100k/yr), the tax federal taxes reported to you on your last pay stub of the year should be around 28%, when you count FICA (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%). Add to that whatever your state income tax is (most states have an income tax). As an example, I have to pay 4.63% to the state of Colorado. I think most states that impose an income tax are within a few percent of that. Then add the hidden employer side of payroll tax (another 6.2%), and you end up with a figure that is close to 40% of income.
Minimum standard deduction and a single personal exemption will remove a few percent from this figure at filing time, and you can delay tax payment through 401(k) contribution, but it is still a very heavy tax rate. It is just well hidden from the average income earner by putting the taxes into a number of buckets.
20% sounds low to me too (makes me wonder whether he missed FICA), but add all them together and you're still not giving half your money away.
I never knew someone in the US that had to get cash to the doctor on the side or bring their own toilet paper and food to the hospital.
I had a friend who broke his arm. The emergency room doctor wouldn't touch him until the family provided some cash.
If you have to provide extra bedding, food and toiletries for a hospital stay on your own - those costs aren't reflected in the taxes that one pays for health care.
This has nothing to do with debating the merits about either system, I'm purely talking about trying to accurately compare the costs.
The system you describe is obviously corrupt, and I sympathize with the frustration, but I might prefer a system where I had to spiff doctors a couple bills to get an arm set over a system where I could be both insured and bankrupted by minor surgery that happened to snag a loophole in my policy. That's the private market insurance system we have in the US.
I lived in the US most of my life. The health care system there is pretty messed up - in my opinion. But when I moved to Hungary I realized I'd been quite naive about how things are here.
I assumed it was a rather cut and dry fact that health care would be better here - and it isn't as simple as I had assumed.