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 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
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
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
The nutritional stuff is like 5th 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 it gets 20 30 40 years past there education.
It’s like we need some kind of driver’s ed test but for living
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, and it also depends on what withholding you have requested.
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.
By design
No, they teach you this in high school. These people are just dumbasses
Yeah, I definitely didn’t leave this in school. I know about it from reading articles on tax brackets. _(‘’)/
Yes, everyone’s education is the same as yours.
“you can’t make less money by making more money”
Unless you’re poor enough to be on welfare. The Welfare Cliff is awful.
This can also apply to student loans when one person makes a lot more than the other.
Run, if it’s not too late.
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 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
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!
We all have our weaknesses and faults. No need to dismiss every relationship due to imperfections.
This is not a US specific issue, tbh. I’ve heard this weird belief repeated by all sorts of people.
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.
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.
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.
Tbh, literacy in the US, financial or otherwise is abysmal right now.
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?
That’s not how is works though.
I’d you made say 1500 normally and 2000 with ot your take home could be 1200 and 1400. Paying more taxes overall on the ot but still taking home more.
There is no way you’d take home less money because taxes are paid on the first $1500 @ $300 and say the next $500 @ $300 too at a higher bracket. Overall your pay is still higher though even though your taxes “doubled”.
Well, it has happened more than once. Of course it would depend on the amount of overtime I worked. It probably happened if I only worked a little OT.
That’s not how it works though. Unless you didn’t work regular hours during that same time period so worked less overall OT is taxed higher upfront so you don’t end up owing (more), but would never decrease your pay
But it did, more than once. Its been years since it happened though. I cant remember the amount of OT I worked that caused it.
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.
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.
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.
have you considered asking him why he even thinks that in the first place? You’ve literally put him into a spot where he’s too stupid to even care about whether or not that response is logical or makes sense.
If he just doesn’t want to work overtime that’s fine, a lot of people don’t, why would he justify it with stupid tax logic that he evidently must know is stupid? Seems like cope to me.
You cannot simultaneously “be smart” and then “be stupid” you are either stupid about something, or not. It’s one of the two. I’m sure he’s a pretty generally smart guy, most people are, but either it’s an excuse he uses because he doesnt want to work overtime, or he’s literally uneducated (and therefore stupid) about taxes, and chooses not to be educated about it, even though it would be financially beneficial to him, because that’s literally how money works. (which would also make him pretty objectively stupid in that case) again, he may not care at all, but then why wouldn’t he just be upfront about not caring?
I would disagree with your premise but it’s not your fault. It’s my fault for not explaining it clearly
I don’t think not knowing something makes you stupid. Humans can’t know everything. We all have strengths and weaknesses. I know about taxes, but I don’t know shit about cooking. He cooks dinner, I deal with the bureaucracy situations.
Also, I’m don’t know if you’ve ever spent time with someone who struggles with ADHD and Neurodivergence but their brains don’t work like others. They can’t force themselves to do things that other people can tough out. They can study all night but if their brain can’t stay on track, they won’t be able to retain it.
When I come along and start telling him how tax brackets work, especially if he didn’t ask me, hes going to be frustrated and he’s not going to get through it easily.
I don’t know if he just doesn’t want to work OT and has settled on this excuse or if there is some other issue but it doesn’t matter. If he doesn’t want to work OT, that’s okay!
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
When you are talking large income to larger income, that makes total sense, but are there limits for access to things like child tax credits where if you go over you are no longer eligible, causing significant increase (I just looked, and it’s at $200k single of $400k jointly, so unless you have A LOT of children, I suppose there wouldn’t be a huge effect)? Similar to people on government assistance who go from getting full assistance to getting nothing at a certain income level?
The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.
It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.
This is a big factor. A lot of people conflate less benefits with higher taxes because fear-brain just knows they both equal increased hardship in the end. They’re technically wrong but their statistically slightly more active amygdalas are responding to a genuine threat, just one that they’ve been very skillfully misdirected into helping worsen.
So an indoctrinated fear response that create a policy advantage for the very elites who created it.
Wow humans are so nice
tbh the more I learn and experience that’s most of the human experience. I had a Minister when I was young that said there’s really only two human emotions, fear and love, and that without significant intervention fear pretty much always wins. I’ve been working in psychiatry for almost a decade now and there’s lots of finer points to be made about human psychology but in the end it pretty much all does just boil down to fear and love.
He was an exceptionally good Minister, to the extent that for while I didn’t understand how common it was for people to be deeply betrayed by a church leader. It was not uncommon for people in the community to genuinely compare him to Fred Rogers (who was incidentally also a Presbyterian minister). Very similar background, temperament, points of advocacy, and even appearance and mannerism; if they hadn’t both been alive at the same time it almost might make me believe in reincarnation.
i dont understand, isnt this graph showing that 2/3 of democrats dont understand how taxes work vs only 1/3 of republicans? wouldnt correct mean that yes, your tax bill goes up?
The options were that your taxes go up by a small amount or substantially. The correct answer is by a small amount since you only pay higher taxes on the one dollar that you’re over.
took me a minute to realize that, too. The wording is just not too good in the graph. “Your tax bill would go up small amount” is not a proper sentence. I would have expected yes/no (which of course makes no sense either).
The question should have been: “if you earn $1 more now, will you have more or less money after tax?”.
oh i see now. thanks.
Nah, also you’re never going to lose out on income by making more money.
Like others said, the only possible exception is if you’re getting government assistance and get kicked off programs you’re in because you went past the cut off. So, as an example, let’s say you’re low income and you get vouchers for school. You could make enough money that you’re no longer eligible for that benefit but the amount you make over the cut off is less than what the benefit was.
But, that’s a specific situation. At no time will your taxes increase more than whatever additional income you’re getting. Period.
I’ve tried to explain that too many times now in my life and I’m not even that old. Just a lot of people are bamboozled by propaganda and lies.
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
Yeah, the Welfare Cliff is the only place where this happens and it’s unconscionable.
lol i wonder how much that is just guessing. they just coin flipped it
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
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 missingormation 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
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.
Shouldn’t it be physically possible to be taxed so much that your income lowers compared to what it was previously?
Like you would have to have a 20% bump in pay, and an increase in taxes that’s like 25-50% or something insane. Of course if you cherry pick data, and pick a high ceiling, and then just barely pass a threshold you can probably make it appear, but that would be a pretty well defined statistical anomaly. And, not very much money.
edit: and this is assuming that taxes literally just don’t work the way that they do, this is WITH broken tax logic.
of course, the idea of a progressive income tax is that at a certain point, it becomes untenable to hold so much money. But unless taxes are literally 100% it’s hard to make the argument that you’re “losing” money.
If the tax bracket for no taxes is $10k, you don’t get taxed if make under that.
If the tax bracket for 5% is $10-20k, and you made $15k, the first $10k is not taxed, but the $5k is taxed at %5.
So you would never make $0 after taxes, even if you made it into the hypothetical 100% tax bracket.
yeah, with how tax brackets actually work, this should be physically impossible, i’m just pointing out that even if it didn’t it would STILL have to be a pretty substantial increase in tax, that you could easily calculate.
And they’ll also refuse to believe you when you try to explain it to them
I’m more concerned about the 33% of dems who don’t understand this.
it’s in the shitpost community and there’s no sources cited
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
Oh
My tired brain read your comment as “shitpost economy” and somehow that still made sense to me.
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 deduction
Not all people take the standard deduction, this is true before all deductions and similar economic stimuli.
It 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.
