Reply to Down and Out on $250K/year....

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Consider a two-income professional family making $420,000 a year, gross. AGI is $385,000. Mom makes $230,000, Dad makes $190,000. Their total tax burden -federal income, FICA, medicare, state and local, not including property tax - is $123,000. Do you really want Dad to stop working because he only get $67,000 after taxes, not even considering any childcare costs? Seems like a dumb policy to tax this type of family to death.[/quote]
Your math, to be blunt, sucks.  It’s the unthinking acceptance of propaganda like this that allows the right wing to thrive and delude the gullible or dim-witted among us.

Under your scenario, the family keeps $297,000 after taxes.  Leaving aside the ridiculous notion that the father couldn’t be bothered to work for a measly $67,000 per year (which is considerably more than the median income in the US, by the way), your assertion that Dad will only get $67,000 after taxes assigns the ENTIRE tax burden to him, and assumes Mom’s salary is not taxed AT ALL.  I’m pretty sure that’s not how these things work.

Let’s run the numbers if Dad stops working, shall we?

Mom makes $230,000, gross.  You assumed an 8.33% reduction from gross to get to AGI – we’ll go with that, leaving her with approximately $210,833 AGI.  You assumed a total tax burden of 31.9478% of AGI.  because they’ll be in a slightly lower tax bracket, let’s knock that down to 28%.  So, Mom will pay $59,033 in total taxes, leaving the family with $151,799 in after tax income.  But wait – when Dad was working, they took home $297,000!  That’s a difference of more than $145,000 – slightly more than the $67,000 you blithely asserted Dad was making on his $190,000 salary.  And that’s not even considering the potential retirement, health care, FSA, etc. benefits Dad may get.

If you’re going to make the “people making $190,000 need a tax incentive to stay in the workplace” argument, please try to come up with some support that isn’t idiotic on it’s face.

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