You Should Know
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
view the rest of the comments
What are the upside of that vs plain minimum wage?
It reduces the onus on businesses and places it on the government (and this indirectly, taxpayers).
Better for small businesses to hire and thrive.
Maybe you just need more tax brackets. Where I live, for some reason, a specialized doctor making $250,000/yr is in the same tax bracket as some C-suit making $900,000.
I definitely need more tax brackets where I live.
Never understood the idea of tax brackets. Why isn't it just continuous? Computers are calculating the tax now anyway, not like it would be infeasible.
I mean to a degree it is continuous. To simplify things the first $10 you make isn't taxed. $11 to $15 is taxed at rate A, $16 to $20 is taxed at rate B, etc. This is what is meant by the progressive tax system. Obviously these numbers are much higher in reality.
People who can't understand this are the ones bragging that they turned down a raise because it would "change their tax bracket". With one exception at very low income, called the benefits cliff, the more money you are paid the more money you take home after taxes.
Does this make tax brackets less confusing? I want to help you and anyone else reading to understand.
I think what they're saying is that it shouldn't be in steps, the tax rate should increase as income increases.
So $11 would be taxed at A.2, $12 at A.4, $13 at A.6 and so on. And $11.50 at A.3.
As it is, it's more discrete than continuous (from a mathematical perspective). Another problem is that it usually stops. Like where I live, and it tops out at about $250,000.
Yeah I get what they mean but that's much more complex. I suppose that's what computers are for but it could make it even harder for people to understand and so many people do not understand the current system.
Definitely agree we need more brackets after the top one. Although this only goes so far, as the more wealthy a person is the more likely their income isn't classified as income anymore. I'd love to return to post WW2 tax rates on the rich but we need to do something to make them pay some kind of fair share. It's disgusting what they get away with.
Tax brackets are there for progressive taxation. Progressive income taxation is the most fair form of taxation. The least fair is consumption tax - such as sales tax. Sales tax tax disproportionately burdens lower income households. Since most places have sales tax, an aggressive progression of income taxation is called for to balance the scales.
Could totally do a sigmoid function and just integrate over the income. But the brackets are just discrete approximation of that.
Sounds like a nightmare to try to explain to someone. Technically it should work, but practically it might be difficult.
Why? To me it'd be much more intuitive. I find brackets quite confusing
The brackets are pretty simple. It's percentages and subtractions. Think "buckets" that spill over in the next when they're full, and each "bucket" has a larger percentage that's taken as taxes. Keep the numbers small so its easier. Imagine that there are three brackets. 0-100$ pays 10% tax. 101-200$ pays 20%. 200$ and more pays 30%.
Someone who wins 150$ pays 10% on the money they made from 0 to 100$, and 20% on the 101st dollar until their last, so they'll win 150-10-10=130$ after tax. They didn't win more than 200$, so no money gets taxed at the third bracket's rate.
Say that person wins 250$ next year. Their first 100$ will result in the exact same 10$ in taxes. Their 100th to 199th dollars will be in the second 20% bracket. Their remaining 50$ falls in the last bracket, so gets taxed 30%. They will therefore this year make 250-10-20-15=205$ after tax.
Said person gets a big promotion and is now making 1000$ the third year. Their first 100$ gets the same 10$ tax, same for their second 200$ with the same 20$ tax. They have 800$ left in the last bracket, which at 30% means 240$. So they'd be winning 1000-10-20-240=730$ that year.
How would an infinitely adjusting tax percentage be intuitive? Brackets are simple. You pay x% on your income in some bracket and y% on your income in a different bracket. You only need simple multiplication and addition to figure out what you would owe.
Brackets are lobbied for. You cant lobby a straight line.