I don’t know, man. Biden and the Dems gave (not that successfully, but still) poor white voters cash straight up and those voters will happily vote against them.
Even if you successfully explain progressive taxation to some derper, I just don’t see it helping.
Derper: The government is taking 40% of everything I earn. That’s robbery. And I don’t get shit for it.
Suzzer: Well you see… (insert minutes to hours of explanation here)
Derper: Ok fine, let’s say I believe you and they’re only taking 10%. Still too much, imo. I can barely make ends meet and you know that 10% is still going to illegals who are taking our jobs.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies from King’s College London, and a postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the London College of Communication (University of the Arts, London). He was born in Luxembourg to a British father and German mother. He is a native speaker of English, German and Luxembourgish as well as a fluent speaker of French, Spanish and Portuguese.
I might have told this story before, apologies if I have, but a friend of mine travelled with a guy who spoke 10 languages. He would routinely pretend not to speak the language of people he was chatting to. They were speaking to a couple Danish girls and the girls spoke to each other in Danish saying “I’ll take the tall guy, you can have the other guy”.
I do pretty well and every year I do the quick division of “actual income tax paid / gross income” and am freshly amazed at how little tax I pay.
People are just fucking morons.
That said, shit gets real fast for high wage earners. Once you hit the top bracket, especially in high tax states, it’s a 40% - 50% marginal rate and I’ll admit that would annoy me given that taxes are basically optional for truly rich people.
I think the main reason people don’t understand income taxes is payroll deduction. The median person will never grasp marginal tax rates because the median person doesn’t even comfortably manage dealing in percentages. But if people had to write a check for $X every April for all of the prior year’s taxes they would absolutely understand taxes better because that’s how their brains do money. People know groceries cost $y a week and Netflix cost $z a month, etc., because they pay it. People don’t even know how many dollars they pay in taxes because they never see that money. Forget about taxes rates and effective vs. marginal taxes.
Super unfair to say this and not give us the stats.
I just checked the numbers and last year I paid just over 21% of my AGI on fed/state/local income tax. Marginal rate around 33%. This is on an income some of you would classify as borderline unlivable in NYC.
Looked at a recent return and we paid 33% of AGI to state and feds. I don’t really get hung up on it but it would be nice if real rich people actually paid taxes.
I think a graph like this might work? Enter your current weekly pay and the new (overtime, whatever) weekly pay, see how much more your take home pay will be.
