I see this become apparent on social media every so often and it's really just depressing how widespread the misunderstanding is.
51% of Americans who were polled in a 2021 survey agreed with the statement that "You pay your marginal tax rate on all of your income".
This is like historical anti-materialism. Not just idealism, but people having their entire conception of their material relations to one another wrong.
It's probably at least partly because at least some high schools literally teach students that income tax brackets mean all income gets taxed at that rate as part of their "civics" curriculum. Education, especially related to economics, is fully captured by far right cranks pushing propaganda through control over textbooks and program funding.
I even remember some dumbshit "educational" video from high school "civics and economics" that had some poor farmer having to not grow his herd because progressive taxation meant he'd be making less money if he made more. That class and the American History class I took the next year both stand out as just constantly getting basic material facts wrong. Like the English classes did a better job of covering history than the actual history classes did.
It's funny, I can only remember the names of two teachers I've ever had and I can barely remember anything of highschool, but I can remember these clear flashes of how completely dogshit most of the classes were, even two decades later.
like people thinking ANY overtime pay will actually make your paycheck smaller then if you just had 40 hours
It really is amazing how that stupid grift still works. It's worth commenting on because it shouldn't be a thing anymore and yet here we are 24 years after Will Smith dropped Willennium and people still don't get it.
It really must be so fucking nice to know there is literally not a lie too stupid or far fetched for their base to believe.
Like imagine being able to live life just inventing your own reality.
Like your boss walks in and you're leaned back in the chair hammered smoking a joint but when you get called into hr you say you didn't do that (you're still visibly drunk and still smoking the joint) and your boss is just a liar who has it out for you.
So hr fires your boss and gives you $10,000 for a screenshot of your signature.
Sometimes I feel stupid and then I remember that most Americans are functionally illiterate and barely know how to add two numbers much less do even basic calculus. Then I feel a little better.
Then I feel really bad again because what the fuck how is it 2024 and people can barely read.
Stream of thought time...
Season 1 of ST:TNG has a line from a child character maybe 10 or younger along the lines of "ahh dad do I gotta do my calculus homework it's so boring" and his dad is all "we gotta all learn the basics son so yes you must do your calculus. But don't worry you also get to do music." I think about this line. Education should be improving. We should be learning more and more things as we learn to educate people. We should be able to take advanced math classes as basics because we know how to impart knowledge. This would of course ultimately apply to everything. We could play so much music. Learn to write such great books. And yet it's just getting worse.
Anyway ya you're right it's crazy about marginal tax rates.
3Blue1Brown is that advancement in math. They create the most beautiful illustrations of math I've ever seen in my life by a wide margin.
I'll have to check it out. I've been reminding myself why math is amazing again recently. Since I'm a weird nerd just doing derivatives is beautiful but seeing visual creativity in math is awesome. There's so much there to do and definitely one reason people don't like math and similar is the way it's taught is so dry and formulaic.
but also unfortunately true. Pretty much any crackpot bullshit ideology can find its own microcosm of reinforcement now.
reminds me about how when I tell someone "I'm not voting for the democrats, we live in one of most solidly blue states in the country" and they rail on me about the lesser of two evils bullshit argument, half the time they don't even remember that the electoral college even exists
But if there is either a seismically historic turnout of republicans or equally unlikely apathy by democratic voters then it's your fault!!! No critical thinking for me
Deliberately miseducated because the Hungry Ghosts needed factory workers and soldiers, not people who could ask questions. The tax code in particular is kept Byzantine on purpose.
I sometimes wonder how much we can blame people; we're here because the programming didn't work on us, but probably for a bunch of different reasons, many of which are also outside of our control.
we're here because the programming didn't work on us, but probably for a bunch of different reasons, many of which are also outside of our control.
If i hadn't got mad at the price of cable 20 years ago and pulled the plug i might be doing cold calls for kamala rn for all i know. I try not to look down on the folks still deep in prop cuz it really wasnt long enough ago i too was in platos cave
yeah, same, i used to think yellow vests were stupid morons for breaking billboards and shop windows...
"I can the better understand the inert blindness and defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was". - H. P. Lovecraft.
"kept Byzantine on purpose." What is the meaning of this phrase?
They mean its kept overly and unnecessarily complex, and difficult to understand on purpose. The reason being because the tax preperation industry lobbies to keep ot thst way because their entire industry is based on it being too complicated.
Byzantine became an adjective to describe a system that is overly complicated and difficult for a lay person to understand the inner workings of. The basis for the word was the bureaucracy of the Byzantine Empire - which was regarded as overly complex and impossible for people outside of it to actually understand. It was probably easier than the US tax code though
Fun fact! The government of the Byzantine Empire was fairly straightforward. Notably, their tax system was a simple flat tax, with additional taxes levied on landowners based on the value of their holdings.
"Byzantine" became synonymous with excessive complexity because—big surprise incoming—some Anglos just made shit up. Basically the 18th century RETVRN bros wanted to trash everything that came after the Roman Empire.
For these, you might need to undergo a procedure that involves drilling a hole in your head.
Thanks! 18th century historians making shit the fuck up is not too surprising, but i hadn't heard about this falsehood yet.
18th century RETVRN bros wanted to trash everything that came after the Roman Empire.
Yeah everything had to fit the Gibbons-esque take about falling into "decadence" and becoming "soft" and "Eastern" shudder
It sucks how pervasive that shit is. It sucks that it was still worming around in my head! Lol
"Byzantine" when used in this context generally refers to something being excessively convoluted or complex
The tax code in particular is kept overly complicated on purpose.
it's drilled in to us repeatedly as children and young adults, a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. it doesn't help that tax payment is unnecessarily complicated to create an industry of tax preparers who lobby to keep the process unnecessarily complicated. so you end up with working people in their 40s who literally have no idea how any of it works, but just repeat anecdotes from others as though they are facts.
I sat in a college level basic law course where the in house counsel for a public agency just straight up lied about estate taxes, with complete conviction.
if you keep everybody ignorant and confused about policy you can advocate for reforms that don't fix anything.
i come from a long line of accountants going back to guys who counted silver coins for some shitty Welsh lord and that's the only reason i ever knew anything about the U.S. tax system
I know someone who was pulling in easily $500K/year and still didn't understand marginal tax rates...boggles the mind
At least they're actually making money.
Half the time it's somebody making 40k who says it's actually good because if they made 45k they'd have to pay more in taxes.
Bonus points for whne you ask them who told them that and it was their boss.
It's disturbing how many Burgerlanders don't really comprehend the difference between a million and a billion, either.
The statement "the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is a billion dollars" is 99.9% accurate.
Maybe if we put it in terms of football fields or empire state buildings or number of burgers...
"The difference between the length of a football and a football field" gets us in the ballpark, but it understates it by about a factor of 3; a football is ~1 foot, and a football field is 300 feet (360 with the endzones).
If taxes are marginal, why do so many people care about them!?!?
The simplest way to pare down the tax code would be to take your percentile of income, and you pay half that % of your income in taxes. Poorest 10%? Income tax is 5%. Richest 1%? Income tax is 49.5%.
That's way too low on the upper end.
Any income over like 2 million dollars a year should be taxed at 100%.
And on the off chance some lib comes in here and says that's why rich people have other streams of income just count all those other streams were all aware of but aren't taxed for no reason.
I didn't say best, I said simplest. Another way would be to make your take-home pay a weighted logarithmic decay curve. That would also be continuous and smooth, but it would involve high-school math that most Americans are utterly incapable of.
