Reply to These small “surprise” taxes are so annoying

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "These small “surprise” taxes are so annoying "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Two things can be true at once:

1) these small surprise taxes are annoying
2) they are fair/reasonable for the 12 percent of households with incomes above $200K, which is more than 2.5x the median income, given that we have a graduated tax system[/quote]

Or 2) graduated taxes are reasonable but this amount on top of the others (both nominal rates and phaseouts of deductions and credits) is too much.

Graduated tax system hits the upper middle class but disappears for the upper class, at which point you have to fall back to the defense of "the absolute tax is greater, even though the rates in practice are regressive".

[b]If OP is paying $2K in these additional taxes, that's because OP makes over $200K in wages and $50K in investments, or over $400K in wages and $0 in investments, or some mix of that.[/b]

OP is also over the Social Security income cap, though (which is partially adjusted for inflation), so if you look at SS as a flat social tax rate and not as a personal investment program, these new taxes essentially just remove the SS income cap for "average" high earners who earn a mix of wages and investments.

You can argue all day about what's a fair level of taxation. You have much ore trouble defending all the nitpicky nickel and diming for a thousand taxes and credits and deductions and HSA/FSA/benefits management is a rat race and a dead weight loss for the people of this country that only benefit the tax preparation and financial services industries.

It's like card fees and rebates writ large. [/quote]

Right, so this tax is between 0.5-0.8% of his total income. I don’t know what his whining is about.

I agree with you that taxes should be simpler, but lots of people (especially in the $250k plus crowd) don’t want that. They benefit from it. So we end up with nickeling and diming.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics