How Much is Enough?

homeagain wrote: AGAIN, what many want is a "flat tax"....simplified so that everything is up front and obvious....
NO loopholes, NO off shore accounts,NO legal eagles that can "bury" bushels of money.....

Good luck getting your liberal friends to agree with a common sense change in a massive gov't bureaucracy like the IRS (which would almost become unnecessary)

homeagain wrote: AGAIN, what many want is a "flat tax"....simplified so that everything is up front and obvious....
NO loopholes, NO off shore accounts,NO legal eagles that can "bury" bushels of money.....

Yep, this goes back to a thread we had a while back. We don't have a tax 'revenue' problem, we have a tax code problem thanks to a bloated government. Change the tax code and eliminate government waste and most of the 'revenue' problem is solved.

Until then, I'm middle class and still getting hit with a 37% tax.

Grady wrote: That 37.27% did not go to support local businesses but will end up being sucked up by government bureaucracy.

For all you know it could have gone to pay on a $600 toilet seat for some over-the-hill military aircraft... But if it makes you feel better--(and it obviously does)--you can think of it as going to "some government bureaucracy"....perhaps to pay for sending John Boehner home on the taxpayer's dollar for one of those extended weekends to play some golf, drink some booze, and smoke a few cartons of his favorite ciggies.....

(Is that what they mean when they say "trickle-down"?....It trickles to the liquor store and the smoke shop?)

LadyJazzer wrote: For someone that automatically sees taxes as "government theft" it will always be "too much". How high is "up"? How low is "down"? The word "enough" is a loaded word, and means different things to different people.

If someone has other loopholes they can take advantage of, (a Mitt Romney for example, with offshore accounts, hidden money, carried-interest), then 37.27% on a bonus is probably not enough in the grand scheme of things, if you're looking at "tax fairness." If it's someone who sees ALL taxes as a "taking", then yeah, it's probably too much. Just think--Your 37.27% is offset by someone else's corporate jet subsidy; or to offset some of the $4-Billion we give away to the fossil-fuel companies every year to explore for what is already making them obscene profits every year. (I prefer to think of it as providing some hungry kid a decent lunch at school, or food stamps for the family to get through some temporary tough times.)

Oh, I'm sorry, were you going to use that 37.27% to create-a-job or something? Was it supposed to trickle-down somehow? My bad.

Sad, very sad. This is the worst case of Mitt Romney derangement scenario I have ever seen.
Guess what? He has employed thousands more people than you have employed and paid millions and millions more in taxes than you have.

FredHayek wrote: Sad, very sad. This is the worst case of Mitt Romney derangement scenario I have ever seen.
Guess what? He has employed thousands more people than you have employed and paid millions and millions more in taxes than you have.

Gee, and it doesn't come close to the Obama-Derangement-Syndrome I see on here every day. I just used Mitt-Flop as an example. If his finances were so on the up-and-up, then why did he refuse to show his tax returns back far enough to show his shady dealings and off-shore shenanigans?

A LOT of people have employed more than I have, and paid more in taxes. A lot of people of his ilk have destroyed companies, killed jobs and sent them offshore ... in the name of vulture capitalism... Excuse me, but what relevance does ANY OF THAT have?

I know that my bonus was taxed higher than my pay, but because of my total income, a lot of those taxes they "took out" came back to me... I can't do anything to change it, so I live with it.

ComputerBreath wrote: I know that my bonus was taxed higher than my pay, but because of my total income, a lot of those taxes they "took out" came back to me... I can't do anything to change it, so I live with it.

True. Most of my coworkers will get that money back at the end of the year. But it would be nicer if they could have it now, and not let the government take it interest free for nine months.

Asking, because I always thought you could adjust your deductions to ALMOST break even,
which is the OPTIMUM outcome.....(No interest free loan to the gov.)

That was not the tax rate but rather the withholding rate. How much it is actually taxed will be calculated when you file your taxes.

OmniScience wrote: This is a question for everyone, but Archer in particular because she recently commented on the need to raise 'revenues', that is, taxes.

This week I received my annual bonus. The amount isn't important, but what is relevant is how much the government "received in revenues".

That would be 37.27 percent. Maybe if I was a millionaire, or even made 6 figures annually this would be less important. But, I'm not and I don't.

So, is 37.27 percent not enough to tax an average middle class guy like me on a bonus, who now will sit back and see more money wasted through government incompetence such as the billions that will go to fraudulent claims via the IRS?

I think this is where your 37.27 percent comes from.

Based on the article posted by ComputerBreath your federal withholding on that bonus was 25% (the "percentage" method described in the article).

In addition you would have 6.2% taken out for Social Security (assuming your total income is under about $110K) and 1.45% taken out for Medicare (no income limit for that, though it goes up more for very high income thanks to Obamacare).

So that gets you to 25+6.2+1.45 = 32.65%.

37.27 - 32.65 comes to 4.62% which I assume is what Colorado withholds (the Colorado rate is actually 4.63% so we're off .01%). So it makes sense to me.

Now, as has been pointed out, that is not what you will actually pay after you do your taxes. In fact since tax time is next month, it might be interesting to see what percentage people here actually pay in taxes. Just look up the tax you paid and divide it by your adjusted gross income. Don't use the taxable income because that is after you subtract your "loopholes" such as exemptions and deductions.

I haven't finished my 2013 taxes yet, but for 2012 I ended up paying an effective rate of 10.5% federal income tax and 3.5% Colorado income tax. To that you can also add in the 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare though those are a different type of income tax (payroll tax) since they only apply to working income and not to other forms of income like interest, dividends, capital gains, etc.

Now, if I were running for office I'm sure the opposition would call me a tax cheat for paying such "low" effective tax rates. But I'm actually paying about typical of what someone making around the 60-80 percentile rage would end up paying. The top 1% average about 20% federal income tax.

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/effective_rates_0.pdf