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malchow

I love this.

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What on earth are you doing that you pay a 40% effective tax rate and spend a few hundred hours doing your tax return?

Medium volume day trading (hundreds or thousands of transactions per day), where you make $500k per year (which will get you to the 40% marginal tax rate, 31% effective). Have to account for the basis of every trade, all short-term gains/losses, and let's assume they're doing that accounting work themselves (the hundreds of hours is a stretch though), and that they're not plugging a csv file into a program to take care of it for them so it's all manual gain/loss matching.

That's about as close as I could come without getting silly. Even oil companies like Exxon don't end up paying 40% (35% effective I think in their last fiscal year).

If you make $5+ million per year, and have nothing to offset any of that, you can end up paying over 40%. Pretty rare group of people likely to fall into that.

Add the ~8% spent by the employer for Medicare and Social Security, and the 31% effective rate becomes ~39%, doesn't it? For income above $200K, there's also an "Additional Medicare Tax" of 0.9%.

I always hear this comical assumption that the employee would automatically receive the matching Social Security and Medicare tax amounts if they were repealed but do you honestly believe that to be true and it wouldn't just go towards padding margins or buying more office supplies?

Employers by definition want to pay employees as little as possible, only enough so they stay.

I think you may have failed to think of freelancers, who are often employed by their own company.

Secondly, the specific effects of repealing a tax doesn't make it any less real.

I was casually lumping in state income tax. That, the Obamacare 3.8% investment surtax, &c., and the situation is reasonably painful for a whole lot of people.

Taxes are around the lowest they've ever been.

What's the point of this comment, all you're doing is trivializing how people use government websites/programs. Also there is absolutely no way your effective tax rate is near 40% unless you're in the 99th+ percentile of earners, a little melodramatic, no?

> "You take ~40% of my money every year. And you took too much this year. Give me a little back, please?"

In my experience, most people are trying to get the biggest refund possible, rather than minimizing the amount they under/overpay.

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