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Some people misunderstand the marginal tax rate because it makes it easier to complain about their taxes.
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Jun 25, 2018 05:09
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Also the fact that America doesn't make your employer do your taxes for you is also insane.
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Jun 25, 2018 05:35
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It requires a basic understanding of math in a nation full of people proud of how ignorant they are. It also doesn't help that people don't really calculate the area under a function until they hit calculus, so even though you definitely don't need calculus to understand a marginal tax rate, the idea isn't familiar until you hit that point.
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Jun 25, 2018 05:42
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Dirk the Average posted:It also doesn't help that people don't really calculate the area under a function until they hit calculus, so even though you definitely don't need calculus to understand a marginal tax rate, the idea isn't familiar until you hit that point. The way I explain it is to use very simple tax brackets. Like $20K, $50K, $100K and so on and simple tax rates like 0%, 10%, and 20%. Like you just don't get taxed on the first $20K you make. If you make more than $20K the tax rate you get to doesn't apply to it. So that 10% only applies to what you make between $20K and $50K. So if you make $40K how do you calculate it? You chop $20K off because you don't get taxed on it. So you apply 10% to the other $20K. $2,000 which is not 10% of $40K. So you get to to $51K. Guess what? 0% on $20K, 10% on $20K, then 20% on $1K. Once again you don't magically pay a poo poo gently caress ton more on taxes because you went from $49,999 to $50,001. And yet there are people that adamantly refuse to believe that's how it works even if you show them the actual IRS documents that say "THIS IS HOW IT WORKS YOU gently caress HEAD." Doesn't matter; they totally have a cousin who works with a guy who knows a guy that got a $5 raise that totally screwed him over by making his taxes triple.
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Jun 25, 2018 06:22
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I wish. I've met more engineers whom don't understand marginal rates of progressive taxation than any other field. "You will never net less by grossing more." That is fuckall easy to understand. "You will always make more money" for the functionally illiterate. I can't believe people think the IRS doesnt understand the tax secret. They can watch me do payroll if they're that incredulous, but somehow extremely curious about tax accounting. Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 06:22
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I wish. I've met more engineers whom don't understand marginal rates of progressive taxation than any other field. "You will never net less by grossing more." That is fuckall easy to understand. "You will always make more money" for the functionally illiterate. I won twenty bucks from a civil engineer assigned to the project I was managing about a decade ago because he bet me that tax rates didn’t work like that.
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Jun 25, 2018 06:26
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The ones that are not engineers, are people who don't make enough to pay taxes holding court about the flat tax.
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Jun 25, 2018 06:31
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Sound Insect posted:"Wouldn't it be cheaper to just put them in jail?" But mentioning that sometimes gets you on the idiot spiral of "well that's all the XBones and GameStations they have, it should be bread and water" logic, somehow mixed in with making prisoners work for the privilege of being in prison. And you don't have to worry about them being resentful and worse people when they get out of your hell camps, because just keep them in longer if they act up. This is very different to slavery and serfdom because...
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Jun 25, 2018 10:46
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Sound Insect posted:the theory itself was based around North vs South homicide rates, which were higher in the South regardless of race. They suggested that the lower end of the class spectrum might subculturally hold violence as an ideal method of conflict resolution.
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Jun 25, 2018 12:16
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OwlFancier posted:Also the fact that America doesn't make your employer do your taxes for you is also insane. They don't even get shops to do tax for them, which I will never understand. Calculating tax at the register? So goddamn stupid.
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Jun 25, 2018 15:46
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I don't know of any other nation apart from the US that puts tax purely in the hands of the individual taxpayer, but as was posted in this thread it is a cynical attempt by HR Block and others to preserve their unnecessary business model while making life harder than it needs be. I don't even think Canada puts people through that, but I haven't lived there in a while and when I was in the RCAF a lot of those things were done for me; let me know if there are any other places that put the burden of calculating tax on the individual. Not really related, but I also don't know of any other countries that make educational debt basically permanent. Once again correct me if I am wrong, but America loves to immiserate people with debt and compounds the problem by having the most overpriced post-secondary education in the world.Megillah Gorilla posted:Calculating tax at the register? So goddamn stupid. Having lived in a handful of European nations for a total of many years this still gets up my nose when I'm in North America, but let's not talk about it. It came up in some other thread and turned into a huge miserable derail wherein a few people were trying to talk sensibly about the difficulties the US and Canada might have in integrating tax into the listed purchase price on goods while a bunch of Americans insulted and belittled the people who wanted to have a calm discussion, led by an infamously ill-tempered poster who fortunately has since been Perma'd. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 17:24
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JustJeff88 posted:I don't know of any other nation apart from the US that puts tax purely in the hands of the individual taxpayer, but as was posted in this thread it is a cynical attempt by HR Block and others to preserve their unnecessary business model while making life harder than it needs be. I don't even think Canada puts people through that, but I haven't lived there in a while and when I was in the RCAF a lot of those things were done for me; let me know if there are any other places that put the burden of calculating tax on the individual. Not really related, but I also don't know of any other countries that make educational debt basically permanent. Once again correct me if I am wrong, but America loves to immiserate people with debt and compounds the problem by having the most overpriced post-secondary education in the world. Doing Canadian taxes (and a handful of US ones) for a living, there isn't much between the two countries at a base level. I haven't dealt with the IRS, though. Canada Revenue Agency still puts quite a bit of onus on the individual Canadian to file and compute their taxes. The employer is required to withhold a pre-set amount of taxes, CPP, and EI based on a table given by CRA, but the final filing is still up to the employee, as well as submitting a TD-1 form that tells the employer if there are any credits an employee is entitled to and to withhold less. Not to mention if someone is self-employed or under-remitted enough in the previous year, they are expected to make installments based on amounts CRA has deemed necessary. With most software these days, it's easy to plug in all your slips and just let it spit out a number. The only real thing most people have to worry about is making sure they get all the credits they're entitled to.
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Jun 25, 2018 18:57
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I've recently started a job as a contractor, and despite needing to work on their schedule to set hours with their equipment and having two bosses to answer to, I'm still counted as 'self-employed' and thus need to do my own taxes. I'm both annoyed and kind of nervous that I'll gently caress something up, especially since there's a couple extra things that go on top of my tax bill.  More related to sales tax, New Zealand has GST factored into the prices for just about anything, and stores that loudly proclaim their pre tax price with the +GST number in small print are shady as gently caress. I've seen that a few times on flyers.
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Jun 25, 2018 21:34
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The IRS really isn't that scary. If you legit just make a mistake a hammer isn't coming down. They just kind of go "hey bruh you did this part wrong" and either send you what they owe you or let you know how much you owe. You have to deliberately under pay to really get their attention. That or just outright cheat. A regular dude just making a mistake doesn't lead to anything nasty.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:02
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JustJeff88 posted:I also don't know of any other countries that make educational debt basically permanent. Once again correct me if I am wrong, but America loves to immiserate people with debt and compounds the problem by having the most overpriced post-secondary education in the world. What I've heard is that it's almost impossible to get rid of student debt because lawyers would declare bankruptcy once they finished law school to wipe out their massive student debts and it got so bad that a court case in the early 70s ruled that you could only get rid of student debt through bankruptcy if you could prove that you'd never pay it back for the rest of your life. At the time I think most student debt was generally a lot lower so it wasn't as onerous since the people with lots of debt were professional like lawyers and doctors, but then Reagan became president and the country kept moving to the right so tuition constantly got raised as colleges were defunded.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:05
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It wasn't only lawyers that did it but yeah that was the core problem. Student loan companies of course got grumpy about it and lobbied for the change. That made sense at the time as there weren't massive hordes of people going into massive debt they'd never repay. Colleges didn't yet have the more enrollment at all costs attitude yet so chances are if you got into law school you had the potential to finish law school. There also weren't fields with far more degree holders than were needed. At the time a college degree really did guarantee you a good job even if you got like a philosophy degree. The big change was colleges acting more like businesses while the explicitly for profit schools rose. Apart from the defunding school increasingly became something that was expected to poo poo out money instead of competent, educated professionals. Getting a degree from certain schools still makes it easy to find a job but really, there are schools that have over a 99% acceptance rate but a graduation rate below 40%. All that matters is getting students in seats. Whether or not they should be there or can afford it is irrelevant. Ratchet up tuition and make them take loans. There's profit to be made!
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Jun 25, 2018 22:17
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Discendo Vox posted:Some people misunderstand the marginal tax rate because it makes it easier to complain about their taxes. I've talked to a number of people who learned it from their bosses, who of course were nice and helpful and gave them a smaller/no raise so they don't get screwed by the tax brackets.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:18
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White Coke posted:What I've heard is that it's almost impossible to get rid of student debt because lawyers would declare bankruptcy once they finished law school to wipe out their massive student debts and it got so bad that a court case in the early 70s ruled that you could only get rid of student debt through bankruptcy if you could prove that you'd never pay it back for the rest of your life. At the time I think most student debt was generally a lot lower so it wasn't as onerous since the people with lots of debt were professional like lawyers and doctors, but then Reagan became president and the country kept moving to the right so tuition constantly got raised as colleges were defunded. I've needed to file bankruptcy for non-educational debt for some time but am too poor to pay for it, which is horribly ironic. If that's the premise, I am going to try and convince the judge that I have no possible way of ever paying it back. I have no faith in anything, of course, but it's very true. The job market in my area of expertise is non-existent and the earning potential is well below the average for my educational level. This is why I said before that I'm worth more dead than alive, but I've always been afraid of declaring bankruptcy in the US because it doesn't take care of educational debt and anyone in America is always one second away from having a medical crisis and being hosed yet again. American higher education has basically become another business like everything else in a capitalist dystopia. It's totally unsustainable but it currently works in the favour of the usurers who dole out student loans, so things like "the future" and "the needs of non-rich people" don't matter. Britain is moving that way as well and it will end just as badly, but I hope that Canada hasn't gotten as bad. I could have gone to McGill for free when I left the air force, but I didn't know that until it was too late. I genuinely loved going to university in the US and it was an elite university for my area of interest, but it's hard to think well of it when I am financially crippled for life with no recourse.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:28
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White Coke posted:What I've heard is that it's almost impossible to get rid of student debt because lawyers would declare bankruptcy once they finished law school to wipe out their massive student debts and it got so bad that a court case in the early 70s ruled that you could only get rid of student debt through bankruptcy if you could prove that you'd never pay it back for the rest of your life. At the time I think most student debt was generally a lot lower so it wasn't as onerous since the people with lots of debt were professional like lawyers and doctors, but then Reagan became president and the country kept moving to the right so tuition constantly got raised as colleges were defunded.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:59
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White Coke posted:What I've heard is that it's almost impossible to get rid of student debt because lawyers would declare bankruptcy once they finished law school to wipe out their massive student debts and it got so bad that a court case in the early 70s ruled that you could only get rid of student debt through bankruptcy if you could prove that you'd never pay it back for the rest of your life. At the time I think most student debt was generally a lot lower so it wasn't as onerous since the people with lots of debt were professional like lawyers and doctors, but then Reagan became president and the country kept moving to the right so tuition constantly got raised as colleges were defunded. Even if this is true, the fact of the matter is that the usurious interest rates is the compensation for the risk of default, so unless the lenders don't want to charge interest (or maybe only have a TIPS-style note that charges interest to cover inflation), I don't feel bad at all for them.
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Jun 25, 2018 23:42
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Tax brackets were my first inkling as a kid that so many adults are terrifically, unbelievably dumb. I remember as a kid thinking how stupid it was that getting a raise could screw you over and reduce your takehome pay and how we need to fix it so only the money in the highest bracket gets taxed at the highest rate, and all the money in the lower brackets get taxed at their various lower rates. That way we'd guarantee that you always got more money after a raise. Of course when I found out that duh of course that's how it works, it blew my mind that so many adults were too loving stupid to even look into how their taxes work to make sure it's really a good idea to not want a raise.
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Jun 25, 2018 23:47
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OwlFancier posted:Also the fact that America doesn't make your employer do your taxes for you is also insane. No, what's crazy is that they practically do make your employer do your taxes for you (if your only income is your job then compiling the info in your w-2 is 98% of the work involved), but then turn around and make YOU do the work anyway because otherwise turbotax don't get paid. Return free filing is something that regularly gets proposed in the IRS and Congress and it never gets anywhere because trade group lobbying trumps the obvious interest of the general public.
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Jun 26, 2018 00:15
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VitalSigns posted:Tax brackets were my first inkling as a kid that so many adults are terrifically, unbelievably dumb. See also: people being real mad at the IRS for how complicated the tax code is.
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Jun 26, 2018 00:23
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I'm calling bullshit. Quite possibly. Horseshoe theory posted:Even if this is true, the fact of the matter is that the usurious interest rates is the compensation for the risk of default, so unless the lenders don't want to charge interest (or maybe only have a TIPS-style note that charges interest to cover inflation), I don't feel bad at all for them. I think the main issue is that the lawyers weren't paying anything, since they'd default on the loans anyway why pay it down? Dunno how high the interests rate were though. Were student loans always predatory or did they under go a similar transformation along with colleges?
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Jun 26, 2018 04:53
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White Coke posted:I think the main issue is that the lawyers weren't paying anything, since they'd default on the loans anyway why pay it down? Dunno how high the interests rate were though. They weren't always predatory. One thing that you hear baby boomers say in response to millenials being burdened with such insane debt is "well I went to college by working a summer job. Millenials just don't want to work for what they want." In those days tuition was like $600 and you could literally just walk around town and ask everybody if they were hiring. By the end of the day you'd find somebody that was. Times are...different now.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:00
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Bankruptcy is a grueling process, and will close doors, especially in law and finance. It may have happened somewhere once, but I have serious doubts about it being so widespread we needed legislation. Most people don't want to sell everything they own. Google is telling me .3% of student loans were discharged through bankruptcy from the beginning of student loans, until 1978, when the rules changed. Womp whomp. edit: Dont take this personally, you were misled by a popular "just so" story. I don't think you we're pulling the wool over our eyes.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:18
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Bankruptcy is a grueling process, and will close doors, especially in law and finance. It may have happened somewhere once, but I have serious doubts about it being so widespread we needed legislation. Most people don't want to sell everything they own. That's not how bankruptcy works.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:20
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All this talk of get out of debt free lawyer and "baby boomers had everything" very suspect. If lawyer could easily get bankrupt proceeding with 0 consequence to avoid law school debt, he would sell same service to many people with debts building up around him after he does for himself. It must be that only few lawyers could really dodge easy. Meanwhile of the college and university, attendance rates much lower all of developed world then of North America and Europe. Across US, Canada, UK, France and so, average is university attendance of today among young adult is twice that of 70s (boomer age). Easy to not have debt if you not go. And much of baby boom generations of the countries came adult in late 60s - early 80s. So 70s which bad decade all around for economy i do not think your parents tell truth if they say "My son in 1975 everyone had job easy". Some people, I think they listen too long to old people telling lies. Start to believe things that are made up about how great the past was when it was not good, just there was less of racial minority around for your racist relative to be upset. No wonder they vote for terrible people now.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:25
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WampaLord posted:That's not how bankruptcy works. Yeah, "I have to sell everything I own" only matters if you actually, you know, own things. If you're a 22 year old fresh out of college you probably aren't exactly rolling in assets. Even then you get to keep things like the one car, the one house, and a few other things. It isn't like you start over at zero. Babylon Astronaut posted:Bankruptcy is a grueling process, and will close doors, especially in law and finance. It may have happened somewhere once, but I have serious doubts about it being so widespread we needed legislation. Most people don't want to sell everything they own. I never actually looked at the numbers but all told "0.3% since then, ever" doesn't cover when the majority of loans were taken which was more recently. You know, after it became nearly impossible to discharge them in bankruptcy. Most of the time student loans have existed they've been difficult to discharge. Aside from that most people in the early days of student loans probably weren't thinking about them all that much as they weren't the hideous, crushing burden they are right now. Like I said before you could pay for most of your college working through the summer. Now even lovely schools can cost more than the average American makes in a year. Then look at top schools. Some of them run $60,000 a semester. That is insane. Bankruptcy also doesn't permanently follow you around. Yes it sticks and fucks up your credit rating for a while but it isn't permanent. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jun 26, 2018 |
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Jun 26, 2018 05:27
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Ok. All your property becomes part of the bankruptcy estate, and your non-exempt assets are sold to pay your creditors. You really think people in law school have no collectibles, cars with equity, investments, musical instruments, or drat near anything that can be sold for money? OK. No, that totally sounds like a process people would go through to save a couple thousand dollars, and demolish their credit and financial standing.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:32
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Ok. All your property becomes part of the bankruptcy estate, and your non-exempt assets are sold to pay your creditors. You really think people in law school have no collectibles, cars with equity, investments, musical instruments, or drat near anything that can be sold for money? OK. No, that totally sounds like a process people would go through to save a couple thousand dollars, and demolish their credit and financial standing. There were people actually doing it and that fact was used as justification to pass said law. Whether or not it was a large number of people isn't relevant; that's literally the reason it happened.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:34
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And I'm saying, that justification is loving bonkers, and it is far more likely that because bankruptcies doubled around that time, they passed a bill reforming the process, and the money people wanted more money.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:43
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Ok. All your property becomes part of the bankruptcy estate, and your non-exempt assets are sold to pay your creditors. No, again, that's not how bankruptcy works. You can keep a certain amount of your assets, the amount varies by state, here in Florida it's like $5,000 worth of assets and up to $1,000 more for a car. This is just for Chapter 7 though, I'm not sure how Chapter 11 works. You are not left with literally nothing. Babylon Astronaut posted:that totally sounds like a process people would go through to save a couple thousand dollars, and demolish their credit and financial standing. Law school debt was way way more than a "couple thousand dollars" dude, and your credit can come back pretty quickly.
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Jun 26, 2018 05:50
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What the gently caress do you think non-exempt means?
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Jun 26, 2018 05:56
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ToxicSlurpee posted:There were people actually doing it and that fact was used as justification to pass said law. Whether or not it was a large number of people isn't relevant; that's literally the reason it happened. Ehe? Surely you not believe every politician scapegoat. I presume welfare queen is real too because Republican say they need to cut service to get rid of it. And the costs, well, they don't seem to have been so high before no longer discharge http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/02/60-years-law-school-tuition-increases-context-american-family-income Before 80s it seem even several year of American law school make difficult to build debt America student build in single semester now... Here is close to free, so can't relate, but certainly it is talked about here much. The figure site use has inflation adjusted so is fair comparison, nice for inflation was very serious before gold peg ended.
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Jun 26, 2018 06:03
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Before 80s it seem even several year of American law school make difficult to build debt America student build in single semester now... Here is close to free, so can't relate, but certainly it is talked about here much. The figure site use has inflation adjusted so is fair comparison, nice for inflation was very serious before gold peg ended. Where is "here"?
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Jun 26, 2018 07:14
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JustJeff88 posted:I actually understand in part the Just World Fallacy, because without it humans lose all sense of hope, which is the basis for what pathetic morality people still have. Nevertheless, it's poison to a society because it makes victims out of the victimised and casts the exploited (the poor) as the victims while turning the real leeches in society (entrepreneurs) into heroes. A lot of countries are bad about this, but it's one of the things I hate... especially about the US where it's the worst. A combination of religious ideals and "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" is a horrible cocktail, and if there is a culture that despises the poor and worships celebrities and the wealthy even more than the USA, I don't want to see it. loving Calvinism, man. The concept that poverty is inevitably the result of moral deficiency comes straight from Calvin's obsession with predestination. It's heavily ingrained in many of the mainline protestant faiths, and especially embraced by the same evangelicals who also lean towards prosperity gospel in the US. The Catholics never really bought into it. Horseshoe theory posted:Even if this is true, the fact of the matter is that the usurious interest rates is the compensation for the risk of default, so unless the lenders don't want to charge interest (or maybe only have a TIPS-style note that charges interest to cover inflation), I don't feel bad at all for them. Well, yeah, but if they can get both the usury -and- inability to discharge the debt, why wouldn't they lobby for that? It's like free profit! Babylon Astronaut posted:Ok. All your property becomes part of the bankruptcy estate, and your non-exempt assets are sold to pay your creditors. If you're a new college graduate, say one from a wealthy family (or poor one) who doesn't actually own anything yet, what do you imagine the drawback is? 'Your credit will be ruined for seven years!' doesn't matter if you can borrow from family or inherit, or are from a background where your parents are just as strapped as you are so being unable to borrow large sums of money is called 'business as usual'. Credit checks as a condition of employment are a post-2000 thing. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 26, 2018 |
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Jun 26, 2018 08:49
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Weatherman posted:Where is "here"? In current time, I live near Marseille. Standard public university undergraduate has responsibility for 200 Euro tuition fee of academic year. It rises for higher level education as much as 600 Euro per year for fancy engineering. You end up pay much more for apartment near university for 6 month then you pay for all of studying :-). My understand is many American pay same tuition for one half of one class of one semester as French pay for whole year, it is so?
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Jun 26, 2018 16:22
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"According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was $34,740 at private colleges, $9,970 for state residents at public colleges, and $25,620 for out-of-state residents attending public universities." So our cheapest option is around... (does googling, math) 43 times as expensive as yours.
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Jun 26, 2018 16:33
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:In current time, I live near Marseille. Standard public university undergraduate has responsibility for 200 Euro tuition fee of academic year. It rises for higher level education as much as 600 Euro per year for fancy engineering. You end up pay much more for apartment near university for 6 month then you pay for all of studying :-). Goon Danton posted:"According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was $34,740 at private colleges, $9,970 for state residents at public colleges, and $25,620 for out-of-state residents attending public universities." Encore pire que tes attentes les plus irrealistes, nepeta? 
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Jun 26, 2018 16:55
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