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
I’m just in awe about those 28% and 33% tax brackets. I’m in the 49,5% bracket here in The Netherlands. That being said, I’m fortunate to be in it.
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 she 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.
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.
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.
WTF is T4 slips
Ah, sorry I slipped in some canadian
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 deductionIt 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.
Not all people take the standard deduction, this is true before all deductions and similar economic stimuli.
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
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.
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.
Probably the lead poisoning have something to do with it.
Some houses still have lead, to this day.
I know because my city recently passed a law requiring landlords to inspect rentals for lead paint, because a lot of kids are still getting lead poisoning.
(Its Philly btw)
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?
I used to be a supervisor at a psych hospital and had to regularly explain this to staff who were refusing overtime. They wanted to do it, sometimes desperately so because they needed the money, but they were utterly convinced that once they crossed 40 or 45k or whatever they would be taxed higher and make it all pointless. I felt like some just didn’t want to do ot, which was fine, but some legit keep meticulous records of their earnings to ensure they wouldn’t go over the line. I swore to them it didn’t work this way but they never believed me
Short of doing a demo with rolls of change or MnMs or something, asking people to conceptualize math that is not just simple addition is often asking too much. Especially when people’s financial literacy is learned at home from people who retired in 1996.
Well look where we are, trump loves the uneducated, they got his thieving rapist ass elected.
The only way that’s a problem is if you’re on certain government benefits, if you make just a little bit too much there’s a hard cutoff for many benefits so you may end up losing more than you made in OT. But if your staff is facing this dilemma, they need to be paid more.
Pay them more? So they can lose their benefits? Are you crazy?
I’m kidding, of course. I know that what you mean is, “pay them so that they can afford to live without requiring benefits.”
You get into some of the poorer places in the country though, that truly would be nearly impossible for most businesses. There are some places in West Virginia that would immediately have no access to gasoline, groceries, etc.
It is crazy to think that Bobby McBusinessman gets to ride around in a giant RV all summer because the government pays his employees. They don’t see it that way though, as they collect their HUD payments and accept food stamps while all of their employees receive food stamps and medical benefits.
All while the rest of the community lives on nothing and experiences very little joy in this life.
What do I know though? I’m just a pissed off hillbilly who helped make someone who isn’t me very rich.
Seen the same bullshit when I worked retail. Nothing will convince them.
It’s easier to trick someone than it is to convince them they’re wrong.
I wonder how different the planet would be if boomers had just been taught, from an early age, that it’s OK to be wrong.
I remember my mom saying something like “don’t believe what you see on tv and only half of what you read.” Yet here we are.
Yeah, I remember my parents teaching me a whole lot of shit that Fox News would call “woke” today. I’m just thankful that I grew up when I did, because if it were now I’d probably have died of measles.
My mom told me “these white people will never see you as an American”
Now she’s blaming democrats for “Migrant crisis”
🤦♂️
We covered how taxes are calculated at school, it isn’t very complicated. Yet SO MANY people insist they end up getting paid more it made me question myself for a while.
Although sometimes the removal of certain benefits does mean people can be worse off for £1 extra. Which if anything is just a sign that the benefits were poorly thought out and should taper off instead of being a hard limit.
There is probably sticker shock involved. Someone who gets a raise will see a new amount of taxes witheld and may be upset. It could even be they didn’t know what the amount taken out before taxes was.
Should print out a poster infographic explaining progressive taxation and put it up on the wall in the break room
Would have to be mandated by workplace regulations, no company is going to voluntarily educate their employees that more money has no downside.
I’ll also say this doesn’t help, it strangely avoids the actual numbers. It should state explicitly that his total taxes would be $1,600+$4,266+$2,827=$8692, and not $13200. Needs to include the scenarios specific results and contrasted with what the viewer would have assumed otherwise.
Yeah I am pretty sure they wouldn’t understand this either
But you have to keep it going to highlight how much wealthier people pay (although that’s tougher since their income is not “income”). Maybe throw in a few examples of the wealthiest Americans and wha recent age they pay, to not only clarify it, but retarget their anger where it belongs
This infographic is kinda bad and would not convince someone who doesn’t know how it works at all
every day, my theory that people are just willfully retarded gets proven more and more correct. Even with the tools at the disposal of the modern internet savvy person, nobody tries ANYTHING to verify ANYTHING.
It’s actually so fucking depressing and i think humanity is joever at this point. I’m not sure how you recover from this point effectively.
I mean in defense of these staff: many of them were not amazingly well educated and were pulling 80-96 hour weeks pretty regularly to earn a livable wage. When were they supposed to do this research?
whenever they have to time to do normal people shit? Even slow learning is better than no learning, you can learn a lot over a long period of time if you keep at it regularly.
Perhaps maybe they should spend less time watching their favorite political sock puppets talk about politics, and spend more time actually learning about shit that’s important and matters. Or maybe instead of yelling at people online about their political views, they could spend that time educating themselves instead. Just a proposal.
I don’t know what demographic you think these people were. They were by and large African immigrants. It’s weird that you’ve created this boogeyman version of them in your head though
They would make stuff like jollof rice and share it with everyone. Super nice people. The only politics they ever brought up was one guy I got to know well would talk a lot about how the elections in the Congo at the time (2010ish) were rigged and the leader at the time was concentrating his power; that war was inevitable if someone did not intervene. He apparently was right because the m23 has been going off there, though admittedly I don’t know the full scale of the situation
are we talking about a specific demographic of people? It’s possible i missed that, but i figured this was a generalized thing.
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.
That’s a loaded question. Poor methodology.
What?
The question isn’t loaded at all, it just tests whether people know how tax brackets work.
Yeah what does “substantially” mean in this context and what are we even measuring? In terms of percentage units, the step from 28% to 33% is definitely a substantial increase. The question doesn’t specify whether we’re talking about total dollars paid or just how much the tax percentage increases in that bracket.
They could have just polled how many dollars the total tax paid increases.
Yeah what does “substantially” mean in this context?
The context is laid out clearly. You earn one additional dollar and that one additional dollar puts you in the 33% tax bracket.
Your tax bill would go up by 33% of one dollar. $0.33. Total.
The question doesn’t specify whether we’re talking about total dollars paid or just how much the tax percentage increases in that bracket.
It’s irrelevant. Your “total dollars paid” in taxes would increase by $0.33, and the difference that extra dollar is taxed vs the previous dollar is $0.05. Neither of these are “substantial.”
This question simply asks whether 0: you have reading comprehension skills and 1: you understand how tax brackets work.
I mean I understand all of these things. But the question is worded in a way that can be interpreted wildly differently depending on the political affiliation of the person responding.
It’s simple math and understanding of the law, what does political affiliation has to do with it?
0.05$ is not a substantial amount of money regardless of your political views.
Am I missing some context here that there’s new taxes passed by Trump? (Am not American)
No, 0.05$ is not a substantial amount of money. A 5 percentage points tax increase could be considered substantial. The question is worded so that it can be interpreted in the latter way, and it’s also using a subjective word like “substantial”. Somebody who is politically against taxes is likely to interpret it the latter way, and hence the poll’s results are skewed by its vagueness.
If we want to measure math skills and understanding of the law, a better question would be by how many dollars the total tax would increase. This would also give us better information on how far off people are.
It asks about the tax bill, as in the total dollar amount paid, not the tax percentage.
But your tax bill doesn’t go up 5%.
Ok, let’s get this close to real numbers. The cited tax brackets don’t exist, so I’ll go with the 24% to 32%. So if your earnings are 1 dollar into the 32% tax bracket, you are going from AGI $191,950 to $191,951. Your tax bill at $191,950 would be:
$11,600 * 0.10 + $35,550 * 0.12 + $53,375 * 0.22 + $91,425 * 0.24 --------------------------------- $39,110.74And your tax bill at $191,951 would be:
$11,600 * 0.10 + $35,550 * 0.12 + $53,375 * 0.22 + $91,425 * 0.24 + $1 * 0.32 -------------------------------------- $39,111.06Your tax bill goes up by a whopping $0.32 or 0.01% by earning that extra dollar, meaning you still got to keep $0.68 of that dollar. When they say that dollar would cause their tax bill to go up a lot, that’s pretty much exclusively owing to the misconception that people assume their tax bill would have gone to $61,424, so in the misconception that dollar would have cost them $22,313.
Please, you’re wasting your time explaining. I know all this. I’m talking about how a libertarian would interpret the question due to its ambiguous phrasing. My only point is that of the original parent comment: the methodology of the researcher is bad.
This may be a language issue. “Bill” in this context means the total amount you have to pay. EG A restaurant bill is what you get from a waiter when you want to pay.
I feel like “your tax bill goes up” is such a simple question.
It means total dollars owed
try telling this to people who think government agencies pay taxes
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.
Sam is the GOAT
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.
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.
you probably stop paying ur isp then
deleted by creator
That was an entertaining 90 minutes of YouTube! And I definitely saw that face
Poor Sam
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
oh i see now. thanks.
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?”.
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.
And they’ll also refuse to believe you when you try to explain it to them
