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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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But you aren't actually a 100k salary employee. Your post-payroll cost to your employer is 106.2k.

But the way you calculated your number is by taking the sticker salary, 100k, and applying the full 3.44% tax there instead of to the real 106.2K, which is why your estimate is higher than it should be. Or, more specifically you took the median household income, $74,580, and multiplied by 0.0344, when the total median compensation for purpose of tax burden is $79,203. If you're going to use sticker salary that's fine, but then you should multiply by 0.0172, which is $1282, half of what you cited. Do you seem what I'm trying to point out?

This is also of course the most extreme solution, equivalent to funding the full 75 year projection window. In reality we likely won't raise it anywhere near this high, we can't even agree on the proposal to raise the tax by $3/week/person to close the gap by a fifth.

How I did the calculation is how it will affect take home pay in practice. How you are doing the calculation is how the government wants you to think about it by pretending that your compensation won't decrease (or more likely will not increase at the rate it would have).

If you're talking about how the tax will affect the rate of change wrt raises you definitely want to factor in the full tax burden. If you're just telling a family who makes $74,580 that they're getting a $2565 tax increase this isn't really accurate and I think this obfuscates more than it clarifies.

I simply disagree. The larger number more accurately depicts how it will negatively affect said family's finances long term.

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