Help me start an lj/blog meme

[dtm]

In a comment on carelessflight's page, I posted this and thought it would make for an interesting meme if it caught on.

The basic idea is this: many people in the U.S. believe that they pay too much in taxes, and so are very ammenable to calls to cut federal income taxes. The fact is, federal income taxes are a small part of the story for people making less than $100K/year, and even for people making more than that, the federal taxes are less significant than might be suspected. The interplay between federal income tax rates and state and local taxes makes cutting federal income taxes an even more dubious proposition for many people.

So, to spread this meme, take out your last paycheck of 2003 (with the annual totals on it) and then post all the deductions from it, taken as a percentage of the gross pay line.

Here are my numbers:

Federal Income tax    10.5%
Social Security tax    5.9%
Medicare tax           1.4%
NJ State income tax    1.9%
NJ SUI/SDI tax         0.25%

Now the non-tax expenses, for completeness:

Disability insurance   0.12%
Medical insurance      4.7%
401K                  13.4%

I should also note that we routinely get a federal income tax refund of about 1.5% of the gross pay line. Since we start to get extra income tax (but not social security tax) reductions this year(*), I'm sure my numbers for 2004 will show even less federal income tax.

An interesting outcome of this exercise is the conclusion that a 40% across-the-board federal income tax hike that also eliminated my medical insurance costs would be a net gain for me, and we're in the top 25%.

I wonder what Bill Gates' numbers look like?

(*) Katherine Grace Martin, born 2004-01-03.

Comments

[joxn.livejournal.com]

This is a neat meme, but I'm a grad student. I actually got an Earned Income Tax Credit last year.

But that only proves the point even more

[dtm]

So what you're saying is that your federal income tax was actually negative.

So you'd be even more supportive of an X% across-the-board federal tax hike in exchange for [[your favorite currently unfunded federal dream project here]].

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Bill Gates's numbers probably depend on whether or not you make him include dividend and capital gains income in his gross pay or not.

My total deductions number is 37.7%, less than your 38.17%.

Indeed.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course, for those of us whose primary income comes from investments, a paycheck analysis doesn't work.

But the conclusions are *still* true -- only worse.

* Without employer-sponsored health insurance, my health insurance costs are even *higher* than average. In fact, my health care costs amount to more than my federal + state tax bill, every year. If I added in Elizabeth's health care costs, it would be even more extreme (luckily, she can get government assistance in New York -- before that I was paying the bills out of my pocket, an enormous and unsustainable expense).

* I end up paying the AMT most years. The extraordinary amount of my time and energy spent filling out those overly complicated extra forms must be worth something, no? If the *ordinary* federal tax was raised to cost me the same amount or slightly more, I'd still benefit just due to the paperwork elimination. I get hit by several other tax code gimmicks -- I would gladly pay a higher nominal rate than have to deal with this crap.

A *doubling* of the federal income tax which gave free health care to me and Bitsy would be a net gain for me. And I'm in the top *5%* by income, and am not hit by the regressive Social Security tax.

Of course, the current income tax system is cleverly set up to give the best deal to people with over a million dollars a year in income. :-P

--
I remember reading that the cost of national health coverage for everyone in the country was in the $30 billion range -- while the cost of insurance company paperwork which could be eliminated by establishing a national health plan like Canada's was on the order of $300 billion. Win-win -- except for the insurance companies, whose interests are now opposed to that of essentially everyone else in the country.

--Nathanael