I feel that “outgroup dumb” is shitposting but it’s from a real poll.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/5057-understanding-how-marginal-taxes-work-its-all-part
And they’ll also refuse to believe you when you try to explain it to them
To be clear for those unaware, you pay the lower bracket rates for the amounts earned in that bracket and the higher bracket rates for the amounts earned above that bracket.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brackets
This is actually not true as it doesn’t take into account the standard deductionIt does not take into account a lot of things, namely the many many deductions for qualifying individuals.
Read the chart, it says taxable income.
Deductions and other tax games may lower you’re taxable income, but the progressive tax brackets apply this way to all taxable income.
I upvoted because you chose to strike thru rather than delete. Big props for that
I try to be accurate. Hence why the comment in the first place.
Agreed, I love people that own their mistakes.
Not all people take the standard deduction, this is true before all deductions and similar economic stimuli.
Tell me you don’t know how income taxes work without telling me you don’t know how income taxes work.
My question is who does their taxes then?
A lot of people don’t know anything about taxes and have their tax return done by an accountant, even if their situation is extremely simple (works one job, no taxable investments or capital gains, no investment properties, no foreign taxes paid).
Even if they did go through the trouble to do their own taxes, the IRS specifically instructs taxpayers to not calculate it themselves, but rather to use a “tax table” to lookup their income and next to it is listed their income tax amount.
What a fucking stupid, needlessly complicated and not accessible system
That’s the point
For someone outside the American tax system, can anyone put the difference in approximate numbers?
Your local tax system probably works the same.
In exact numbers, 5 cents.
This all boils down to a common misconception about ‘tax brackets’.
To simplify, pretend there’s a 28% tax bracket up to 100,000 dollars, and a 33% tax bracket when you hit 100k. The first 100k is always taxed at 28%, no matter what you make, and it’s only the incremental amount that gets taxed heavier. So here in this example, that would mean tax burden would be 28,000.33 instead of 28,000.28. These are not the exact brackets or percentages, but it’s at least showing the right magnitude of increase versus total amount.
However, many people are “afraid” of bumping a higher tax bracket. They think the tax bill would go from 28,000.28 to 33,000.33. That the tax bracket bumps up all your liability. I remember growing up people saying “I have to watch out and not hit the bigger tax bracket, if I’m close then I need a big raise to make it worth it, or else the raise is going to cost me more than it would make me”. This a big driver of antipathy toward democrat tax policies, a belief that mild success will punish them, despite it only increasing on the incremental amount.
OK, so it is similar to our system. And would probably in the range of cents or a few dollars then.
To be more specific the first 100,000 isn’t taxed at 28%. The 44 to 100k range would be, but below that will be taxed at lower percentages. The first ~10k you make is taxed at 10%, and then it increases throughout.
The first ~10k you make is taxed at 10%
In the USA, technically the first $15,000 (if single) or $30,000 (if married and filing jointly) at least is taxed at 0% due to the standard deduction. If you earn less than that, you can tell your employer that you don’t want any tax to be withheld.
If getting specific, there’s no 28 percent or 33 percent bracket, so these are all examples rather than real figures. I did make a comment using real numbers, same general magnitude but just more specific about the brackets.
German income tax works the same and most Germans get it wrong too. It’s really infuriating.
A lot of US benefits have “benefit cliffs” where making $1 more substantially reduces or even completely disqualifies a person from programs like SNAP (food stamps) or childcare subsidies or Medicaid. https://www.ncsl.org/human-services/introduction-to-benefits-cliffs-and-public-assistance-programs
It’s not surprising people whose families are directly affected by, or who know people affected by, benefit cliffs think the lawmakers set up taxes the same way.
True, though if we are talking about tax bracket going over 30 percent, that would be at nearly 200k, so well above those thresholds too. Of course the numbers aren’t 28 and 33, but that is the closest threshold to the example.
We took a huge hit in our cost of living when we fell off the benefit cliff. I know it’s lost credits rather than more taxes but it doesn’t really matter when you make more and struggle at least as much as before.
That one dollar in the 33% bracket has .33 in taxes instead of .28. So their obligation goes up .05 per every dollar in the 33% tax bracket.
And this why democracy won’t work. How can people votw in their best interests when they don’t know how basic taxes work
even if people were mega geniuses it wouldn’t matter, money talks, and it talks a lot louder than people
These people are allowed to vote, and that is why we are all fucked.
this was pushed in the 80’s/90’s on conservative talk radio (iirc). strangely, it gets an ideological push from the phenomenon of income reduction resulting from lost welfare benefits as income increases. the brain correlates things irrationally.
That’s a loaded question. Poor methodology.
What?
The question isn’t loaded at all, it just tests whether people know how tax brackets work.
Yeah what does “substantially” mean in this context and what are we even measuring? In terms of percentage units, the step from 28% to 33% is definitely a substantial increase. The question doesn’t specify whether we’re talking about total dollars paid or just how much the tax percentage increases in that bracket.
Yeah what does “substantially” mean in this context?
The context is laid out clearly. You earn one additional dollar and that one additional dollar puts you in the 33% tax bracket.
Your tax bill would go up by 33% of one dollar. $0.33. Total.
The question doesn’t specify whether we’re talking about total dollars paid or just how much the tax percentage increases in that bracket.
It’s irrelevant. Your “total dollars paid” in taxes would increase by $0.33, and the difference that extra dollar is taxed vs the previous dollar is $0.05. Neither of these are “substantial.”
This question simply asks whether 0: you have reading comprehension skills and 1: you understand how tax brackets work.
I mean I understand all of these things. But the question is worded in a way that can be interpreted wildly differently depending on the political affiliation of the person responding.
It’s simple math and understanding of the law, what does political affiliation has to do with it?
0.05$ is not a substantial amount of money regardless of your political views.
Am I missing some context here that there’s new taxes passed by Trump? (Am not American)
No, 0.05$ is not a substantial amount of money. A 5 percentage points tax increase could be considered substantial. The question is worded so that it can be interpreted in the latter way, and it’s also using a subjective word like “substantial”. Somebody who is politically against taxes is likely to interpret it the latter way, and hence the poll’s results are skewed by its vagueness.
If we want to measure math skills and understanding of the law, a better question would be by how many dollars the total tax would increase. This would also give us better information on how far off people are.
This may be a language issue. “Bill” in this context means the total amount you have to pay. EG A restaurant bill is what you get from a waiter when you want to pay.
It asks about the tax bill, as in the total dollar amount paid, not the tax percentage.
But your tax bill doesn’t go up 5%.
Ok, let’s get this close to real numbers. The cited tax brackets don’t exist, so I’ll go with the 24% to 32%. So if your earnings are 1 dollar into the 32% tax bracket, you are going from AGI $191,950 to $191,951. Your tax bill at $191,950 would be:
$11,600 * 0.10 + $35,550 * 0.12 + $53,375 * 0.22 + $91,425 * 0.24 --------------------------------- $39,110.74And your tax bill at $191,951 would be:
$11,600 * 0.10 + $35,550 * 0.12 + $53,375 * 0.22 + $91,425 * 0.24 + $1 * 0.32 -------------------------------------- $39,111.06Your tax bill goes up by a whopping $0.32 or 0.01% by earning that extra dollar, meaning you still got to keep $0.68 of that dollar. When they say that dollar would cause their tax bill to go up a lot, that’s pretty much exclusively owing to the misconception that people assume their tax bill would have gone to $61,424, so in the misconception that dollar would have cost them $22,313.
Please, you’re wasting your time explaining. I know all this. I’m talking about how a libertarian would interpret the question due to its ambiguous phrasing. My only point is that of the original parent comment: the methodology of the researcher is bad.
I feel like “your tax bill goes up” is such a simple question.
It means total dollars owed
No source?
Don’t need one. The amount of times I’ve had to explain how fucking tax brackets work, I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were even more skewed towards the wrong answer.
This is how missinformation spreads though. If something lines up with your existing worldview then you just assume it’s true.
Trust but verify
Lol no. Verify then trust
Oh, you know: Tomato tmahto, potato criptofacism.
This is absolutely an educational failing. We barely cover taxes in school. At best it’s said once in a class, gets covered in a minor question on a test and if we get it wrong, no one notices. “We” probably still got a B on the test without any CLUE how taxes work.
Yet here we are, dismantling any nationwide effort to make education better.
A LOT of people think 99,999 tax is 27,999 and 100,001 is 29,000, even on the democrat side. If those charts are accurate, it’s probably damn close to 50% of US citizens.
I seriously don’t understand why we don’t have a mandatory class that covers taxes, T4 slips, investing, labour laws, budgeting, reading nutritional information on foods, etc.
WTF is T4 slips
Ah, sorry I slipped in some canadian
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It was all covered in my Florida education. For the most part it is just a very small amount of information that people tend to forget it. It also isn’t all taught in one class. (T4 slips are called W2 forms in the U.S. for those questioning). The investing thing is a broad generalization though. I assume because it may get considered an overlap of teaching kids to gamble. Everyone was required to take either micro or macro economics in high school though for us, both of which touched on stock market invement mostly just tied to the idea of a 401k (retirement accounts).
Nutritional labels were covered in science classes multiple times, but we’re touched on in middle school science, and we were all required to take a home ec class for half a year in 7th grade which taught about it as well. Again in physics and chemistry classes.
W2s were covered in our mandatory typing class as a form of data entry, because most people only take the data from boxes off the W2 and enter them into a tax program. Then the tax brackets were taught to us in middle and highschool.
A lot of it to me is that we don’t pay attention in school and forget a lot over time. Nutritional and Tax bracket questions were on both the ACT and SAT. Which are national tests required to get into colleges.
The nutritional stuff is like 6th-grade science, about the time you should be burning peanuts with a Bunsen burner.
I’ve seen a few schools that have an elective financials class, but I think they’re still trying to balance checkbooks.
The problem is it’s just one class, and nobody takes classes seriously in high school. Most of them have forgotten the things that they used to know when they were 20, 30, or even 40 years past their education.
It’s like we need some kind of driver’s ed test but for living
edit: 6th grade, no fire in elementary school
I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?
I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)Yeah, there’s a lot of lessons in school that we’re not actually ready for. We need some kind of continuing education stuff like they do in the medical profession. When we hit our 30’s and 40’s and our bodies handle food differently, we need those diet courses again. And when we move out of home, we need those finance and home economics classes that haven’t been looked at for a decade.
try telling this to people who think government agencies pay taxes
Poor Sam
That dude would have been hilarious if he wasn’t really so delusional. Not Sam, he was great. The dude that was convinced that government agencies get tax breaks.
Sam is the GOAT
What? Is this the onion?
One of those rage bait YouTube channels had a young person who made that claim in a debate. Pictured is Sam Seder who was the debate opponent. He made this face at the camera.
Thanks
The channel is Jubilee. The format is that 1 fairly prominent political activist debates 20 people with an opposing position for a few claims the 1 has given beforehand. The 20 swap out who gets to debate at any particular time by voting them out.
I’ll admit it is ragebaity sometimes, but I also find it educational and entertaining. There’s typically about two among the 20 that have gone off the deep end, but everyone else is respectful and appreciative of the opportunity to engage the other side. Also, it does have good fact-checking so the crazies are at least recognized properly.
This is the video the image came from.
They give Nazis a platform. I don’t watch it because of that. Plus I try to avoid rage bait content as much as I can.
you probably stop paying ur isp then
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when did i say that
That was an entertaining 90 minutes of YouTube! And I definitely saw that face
Hmmm, I better send a suggestion letter to the ATO (Australian Taxation Office) to put the tax bracket breakdown directly into your return with the amounts populated.
Hey, they give us a breakdown graph of where our tax is going, this seems like it’s within the realm of possibility.
I think sadly there are also many people here who have no idea how tax brackets work…
Thanks, Lemmy, now I’m “that Dad”. After reading this, I went to dinner with my two teens and one of their girlfriends, so of course I had to bring this up. All three have started working after school and will need to file their taxes this year so they need to know.
But holy crap is that a seriously uncool conversation
If you ever wanted proof that a population that doesn’t understand math allows the billionaires to take advantage of them here it is. This is why education systems are under attack, because if you understood how taxes work you’d more likely support higher tax rates for the rich.
I think this is at least partially the result of intentional propaganda. It benefits the elite greatly if a lot of Americans are screaming against higher top tax rates due to this faulty logic. There are also a lot of anecdotes of people not accepting higher paying job offers or promotions within their company, which also benefits the business owners.
https://youtube.com/shorts/-621rVJvUdY
Mr. “Population collapse is the biggest threat to the world.”
Maybe it’s just the biggest threat to capitalism and your ROI. Why do you think he’s supporting the make everyone dumber party?
Probably the lead poisoning have something to do with it.
Some houses still have lead, to this day.
I know because my city recently passed a law requiring landlords to inspect rentals for lead paint, because a lot of kids are still getting lead poisoning.
(Its Philly btw)
If you ever wanted proof […] here it is.
Yes! Well yes but also no but only because…
@[email protected] I always do the web search when OP didn’t happen to think about linking a source but this is egregiousDANGIT IT’S A SHITPOST I AM SO SORRY
Hungary used to have a system, which worked like what the republicans imagined, which made “taxing the rich more” a widely unpopular move…
FWIW globally, there is the issue of “welfare traps”. Benefits for low income people are usually tied to income (or savings). Once income reaches a threshold, these benefits must be replaced with income. So a higher income may result in a net loss.
