<quote name="Dave Smith" date="Fri, 27 Jun 2008 at 12:43 -0600"> > Von Fugal wrote: >> I'm all for scientific advancement, but 40% of my income is an aweful >> lot. If everyone in the country was 40% wealthier... well, use your >> imagination. > > Are you sure you pay 40% of your income to taxes? > > I tracked all my taxes for a month (every piece of tax: sales tax, > property tax, gasoline tax, income tax, social security tax, phone bill > taxes, etc), and it wasn't that high.
Interesting... I pulled that number out of the air (maybe I heard it somewhere and my subconscious brought it up) but I look at a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States and hey look! 40%! wow I'm good! Then another figure: "government will collect 30.8% of the nation's income for 2008." And that doesn't even account for inflation, the hidden tax. What? You _really_ don't think that government benefits from being first to use new money where everyone else pays the price? Sure sounds like a tax to me. Not bad for pulling a number out of the air, if I do say so myself. Just for fun, let's do a little excersise. Your employer pays about 6.5% sales tax on all goods he buys, and assume supplies cover about 50% of expenses. That's 3.25% of total employer cash flow. I'll leave out employer income tax because I don't know how it would factor in. You, average joe american, let's say you pay approx. 15% income tax. You also pay 6.5% on sales tax, assume 40% of cashflow, so 2.6%. Another 10% of your cashflow goes to gas (probably conservative value here) which is taxed at about 13%, so another 1.3% of cashflow. Let's assume about 40% cashflow goes to rent/mortgage/debts/whatever, we'll ignore the intricacies and forgoe estimating tax figures on that portion of your income. Jacob gives me this nice formula for tallying these 'discounts': 1 - prod { discount d | (1 - d) } 0.0325 employer expense = 0.9675 (1 - d) 0.15 income tax = 0.85 0.026 sales tax = 0.974 0.013 gas tax = 0.987 1 - (0.9675 * 0.85 * 0.974 * 0.987) = 0.2 That's 20% just for this vastly over simplified excercise. I can certainly imagine it being much worse. After all, we left out employer income tax, other employer taxes, HALF of your cashflow after it goes into your pocket, and this STILL doesn't account for inflation. And don't forget the taxes paid on gas to deliver all your goods, this cost gets passed on to you. Von Fugal
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
/* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
