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
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?
If you ever wanted proof […] here it is.
Yes! Well yes but also no but only because…
@General_Effort@lemmy.world 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
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 deductionRead 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.
It does not take into account a lot of things, namely the many many deductions for qualifying individuals.
Not all people take the standard deduction, this is true before all deductions and similar economic stimuli.
This is the problem. My partner doesn’t want to work OT because he thinks it will cost him more in taxes. I explain why that’s not exactly true, but I can tell he’s not interested. Financial Literacy in the US is abysmal.
Your partner is a moron who doesn’t understand relatively simple math.
Nah. He’s not an idiot. But he is impatient. He doesn’t handle paperwork or anything involving patience well. (ADHD)
I also think taxes in the US are intentionally over complicated and confusing. I don’t struggle with things like that but I can empathize with people who do.
Strictly speaking the taxes in the US are not that complicated, but the credits, deductions and what not are. Still Tomato Tomato.
I too have ADHD and am impatient (combined type, severe). Impatience is not an excuse for financial illiteracy. And a graduated income tax is not complicated. Deductions, credits, exceptions, etc are where it gets complicated. But if he thinks he’s losing money by making more money, then he’s stupid.
Reading your other responses, you’re right. Not knowing something doesn’t make someone stupid. Refusing to learn something when you find out you don’t know it, that’s what makes someone stupid. Willful ignorance is stupid.
At the very least, he should just admit he knows nothing about it and just take your word for it. Deferring to others expertise in areas you are weak is smart.
There’s not enough information provided to reach this conclusion.
There is very much enough information given to reach that conclusion.
No, there is not. There are many tax credits one is no longer eligible for after a certain threshold. There are various programs one is no longer eligible for after a certain threshold.
Most of the likely credits tend to phase out gracefully. So it’s true that we can’t be certain, based on my experience of when people are afraid of making too much money, it’s almost always because they think a higher tax bracket applies flatly across their income not due to nuanced understanding of tax credit and welfare benefits.
This is true for many people I’ve talked to, but he does understand, on a basic level, how the brackets work. When it comes to the calculation parts, I think he gets frustrated with all the rules.
But it’s okay! I’m good at stuff like that and he can build pretty much anything. We all have our strengths. :)
Hellllll yeahhhh!!!
Yooo is he visual?
Awww I thought for sure we were gonna have the perfect diagram thing…
Bah. So maybe there’s some YouTube video where they’re like “Bob made $50,000 last year. This year he took some extra construction shifts and made $75,000. …”
I don’t care about the partner’s weaknesses I demand clever solutions :p hehe glad everything is good!! 💙
Edit with silly riff that’s probably inaccurate:
I’m kiddddding this was just the evil thought when I first read it :p
This is not a US specific issue, tbh. I’ve heard this weird belief repeated by all sorts of people.
You’re absolutely right. I cant speak for anyone else, as I don’t live there but I highly doubt the US is an exception.
Rather than being mad at each other, I want to make sure we hold the right people accountable! Governments, corporations, billionaires etc.
It’s a form of oppression.
it is a misinformation many people in power wants to keep because it lets republicans sell their policies to not tax the rich and bosses to not raise their employee’s salaries.
I’ve heard it in Australia too, which has the same tax bracket system as the USA. I think the fact that this stuff isn’t taught in school is a major issue.
Oddly enough it kinda does. OT can make you pay out more taxes on that one check since withholdings are calculated by check. Basically the government/payroll system thinks you’re going to be making that every week so more taxes will be taken out.
In reality this only effects the size of your tax bill or return at the end of the year.
That’s what people see and exactly why they think they got kicked up a whole tax bracket.
The whole notion of “kicked up a tax bracket” is also a misleading thing. Only a piece of your income goes into the “new bracket”, all pay under the new bracket is taxed as they would have been used to.
Exactly, and it also depends on what withholding you have requested.
“you can’t make less money by making more money”
Run, if it’s not too late.
Nah. He’s not a bad person or a dummy. He just gets frustrated by bureaucracy and doesn’t have the patience I have.
It’s not the fear of bureaucracy that is concerning, it’s the lack of interest to listen to your sound advice on a relatively simple topic.
That’s fair. I appreciate your concern for me!
He’s not always like that. I didn’t mean to make him sound like a jerk. I just meant to relate to the topic of tax confusion with personal experience.
He had pretty severe ADHD and struggles with some topics. It’s okay! I deal with the money stuff and he cooks dinner. :)
Fair enough. Good luck on your journey!
You too!
We all have our weaknesses and faults. No need to dismiss every relationship due to imperfections.
Nah. There’s good people here and even the people who voted for this deserve to have their needs met, many of then are only personally responsible for a tiny fraction of the immense harm caused by the systems of power. And they may not have caused any harm in the first place if they lived in a place where people are always taken care of as well as is reasonably possible. there is immense pressure to shed empathy and embrace individualism and forego the many benefits of community such as efficient and effective collaboration, for example to prevent a disease from spreading or at least reducing the harm it causes. As many of us can see, especially obviously in the US, the goal and function of the system isn’t actually to stop causing harm in the first place, or even reduce the harm that must be caused for your society to function, the cruelty is often very much the point. Non-absolutely essential needs are less and less profitable to meet the less common it is to have the need, and the amount of wealth that can be extracted from the people with whatever need is the only thing that really determines what gets things done, and subjugation and not giving folks a chance to think critically and question their circumstances by completely overwhelming them with horrible information (including dis- or misinformation) about the world and making them think they’re threatened by whoever is opposing efforts to make line go up. Most folks don’t stand a chance without direct intervention and time spent with someone directly affected by the system in an obvious way, including possibly the person themselves.
At the very least I owe it to my family to stay and be as helpful as possible to the people who have supported me and hopefully others who don’t deserve what’s coming if a major effort of community organization doesn’t happen
Tbh, literacy in the US, financial or otherwise is abysmal right now.
it’s just not the US. I live in the Netherland and many people here think OT and bonuses are taxed differently, because they see a higher tax rate applied to it on their slip. They forget that their base salary covers multiple brackets and a tax credit. Thus has a lower average tax rate than their OT and bonuses which falls in their top bracket or even a bracket above.
By design
No, they teach you this in high school. These people are just dumbasses
Yes, everyone’s education is the same as yours.
Yeah, I definitely didn’t leave this in school. I know about it from reading articles on tax brackets. _(‘’)/
I’ve had jobs (more than one), where working OT would result in my paycheck take home pay being less than if I had not worked the extra hours. And that’s because it moved me into the next bracket, and more taxes were taken out. So why waste my time working OT?
I think you’re on the wrong side of the chart here.
Or the person calculating their withholding was. But if you’re paycheck to paycheck then that paycheck amount is all that really matters. Cool, I get a bigger refund eventually, but I’m now choosing between eating, walking 2 hours to work to save gas, or letting a bill go unpaid.
I’m more concerned about the third of dems who don’t understand this.
it’s in the shitpost community and there’s no sources cited
My tired brain read your comment as “shitpost economy” and somehow that still made sense to me.
Oh
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
It boggles my mind how many people who have had to pay taxes for decades even, don’t understand how tax brackets work.
The only time you’ll get screwed on making more is if you were getting some sort of socialized assistance and you make a dollar over the cut off for aid.
It is kind of by design to keep people from trying to get ahead at all
And to keep the private tax filing agencies afloat
try telling this to people who think government agencies pay taxes
Poor Sam
Sam is the GOAT
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.
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.
That was an entertaining 90 minutes of YouTube! And I definitely saw that face
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.
Thanks
This belief is held by many older folks due to propoganda, and it is passed down to their children when their parents teach them about taxes. Since almost all younger folks use automated tax services, if they aren’t doing the math themselves, the fact that this isn’t true isn’t going to be discovered. I was taught the incorrect way when I was a kid, but noticed that it was wrong the first time I had to do my own taxes. But when I told my parents the way it actually worked, they didn’t believe me until I showed them the .gov site that breaks it down. I grew up in a small, blue collar town, and every single person I talked to about taxes parroted the same incorrect system.
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
deleted by creator
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.
Where i live we have a system where if you take sick days, they are paid 80%. 20% reduction applies only to the days you were sick. Once I got sick at the end of a month and took the last 3 days of the month and first 2 days of the next one off and my mother in law freaked out I’m about to loose 20% of 2 month’s salaries. She was and is still convinced that 20% deduction applies to a whole month worth of salary even if you take one day off that month. She almost never takes sick days and she works in a hospital… She self medicates and works with patients even when she has a transmittable diseases. Best of luck to those who have serious health problems and then get a fucking flu on top of everything from hospital staff. She is 60+ and reading the law to her doesn’t change her mind. A couple years ago she had more serious health problems and took a week off for the first time in decades, even after getting a paycheck reduced only by 5% and not 20% her perception of this issue didn’t change. She misunderstood that system once 40 years ago and she is going to take that misunderstanding to ger grave. Real world has no influence on her beliefs.
That’s the general conservative mindset. It’s why lies work so well on them, get them to believe the lie and they’ll never let it go.
And they’ll also refuse to believe you when you try to explain it to them
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.
How dumb do you have to be? By the time you make that much money you should, in theory, know the answer definitively or have a guy.
Almost everyone has a guy or uses some software. Those two things don’t help them understand and this misconception of how taxes work is but a small sample of how people form political decisions without any viable understanding of the situation they’re in or the repercussions of their actions.
Nobody’s just making out a check for 30% and mailing it off to the IRS.
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.
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
For someone outside the American tax system, can anyone put the difference in approximate numbers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OK, so it is similar to our system. And would probably in the range of cents or a few dollars then.
German income tax works the same and most Germans get it wrong too. It’s really infuriating.
In exact numbers, 5 cents.
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.
Your local tax system probably works the same.
