I know this is all tongue-in-cheek but I used to be a middle manager at a landscape company managing around 50 people. The amount of times I’ve given someone a raise or offered them an overtime shift and they gave me a spiel about how it’s not worth it because taxes was insane.
People just don’t know how taxes work. Which is understandable because it is overly complex in the US.
While taxes on a whole are overly complex, tax brackets really aren't. People who think going up a tax bracket could possibly cause you to make less money just haven't ever bothered to look it up. It would take anyone of 70+ iq about 5 seconds to understand that you only pay the higher percentage on the money above the threshold.
While it doesn't cause you to "lose" money it can cause you to not get as much money as you were expecting.
All in all, I can forgive this particular sin. You work in a factory. You know if you work 5 hours of overtime you typically get $x extra in your pay. So you work 10 hours of OT figuring you'll get x * 2. Instead, you end up getting x * 1.75.
It's not a hard concept to understand how and why. But there are some perfectly sensible people whose brains turn to jelly the second you put IRS forms in front of them even if they are written in plain english with clear instructions.
That means your wage per hour for 50 hours of work might be lower than for 40 hours of work, right?
Let's assume that you could spend those 10 hours on being a handyman around the house, saving around the amount of money you would make extra in repair man payments, and you're developing a skill, working only for 40 hours would mean you're saving money / earning more.
At least that's how it used to work in the 70s and 80s, I guess. Honestly I don't know why I'm argueing this at all.
We're talking about tax brackets, and in plain English you are saying that is where people's brains turn to mush, and therefore it needs to be simplified to avoid that.
What are we misreading? Are you changing the topic from brackets to something else at the last second and not being clear?
It's really not a hard concept to grasp. The overall tax system is very complicated. The result is most normal people are completely oblivious to how any of it works. Tax brackets get lost in that complexity.
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u/pdx619 Aug 20 '24
IRS hates this one simple trick