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Comment by zamnos | Hacker News Reader

California's state income tax is 12.3% starting at $677,276, so the top rate is 49.3%, and actually surpasses 50% once other taxes are taken into account, and then you have to factor in healthcare costs on top of that. Which as you get older and later into your career (which is when you'd make that much money anyway) can't be ignored either.

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High-income wage earners on the US typically get health insurance from their job, which is a tax-exempt benefit that isn’t included in income statistics. After retirement age, Medicare will pay for most medical expenses, although it’s still smart to save some extra money for whatever Medicare doesn’t cover. Amortized over a career, reasonable savings for post-retirement health care might amount to 1% or so for someone in that income range.

> High-income wage earners on the US typically get health insurance from their job

This increase the total cost of labor which effectively is the same. Of course on the higher end paying a lump sum is way more optimal than an extra 10% tax to fund healthcare. If your income is low.. we’ll it’s a highly regressive system without government support. And with government subsidies it becomes effectively the same just extra hoops.

But that's the top marginal rate filing single. A California tax payer earning $677,272 pays 49.3 percent on each additional dollar but 43.9% is the effective rate on whole income. This is a very high single earner income.

A married couple with this income pays only 37.5% and doesn't max out until going over 1,359 million, at which point they pay the 43,9 effective.

You have to be a truly massive earner to hit 50% effective in CA.

The healthcare thing is really a moot point. Everyone who can afford private medical care in the UK goes private for anything they can. The NHS is good (and I _do_ mean just 'good' -- the quality of US healthcare is very uneven across the country, but the best care possible, by a substantial margin, is undeniably in the US) for emergency medicine and surgery, but the general consensus is that it just-barely-kind-of-works-sometimes for everything else.

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