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Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

Income tax is not the only tax one pays. Every penny one spends, saves and withdraws is taxed. It may add up to more than 50% in some instances.

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The thread is specifically about income taxes. Everyone always wants to act like $0.75 of every dollar they make goes to The Man but it's just not true. Most of the money you make, you keep, to spend on your needs and wants.

People making a quarter million a year whinging about income taxes is offensive by its own right, but it becomes even more so when they arbitrarily double the amount actually paid to try to prove from technolibertarian talking point nonsense.

Companies pay, behind the scenes, another chunk of payroll tax that is roughly equal to what the employee pays. It doesn’t make the total 50%, but the taxes paid on your salary are higher than just 25%, even if it doesn’t show up on your paystub.

So now we're including taxes paid by the company when discussing personal income tax rates?

The amount paid is directly proportional to your payroll cost, just like your income taxes. Both amounts are paid by the company directly to the IRS. The only real difference is that one amount is just put on your pay stub, one is not.

It seems disingenuous to not consider it a part of the taxes paid based on your income (though it certainly sounds better to say that we only pay, say, 25%, instead of 40%).

Since this cost is associated with payroll (a.k.a. your income, as a worker), it's fair game to put the employer contribution to FICA under taxes on worked income.

I am not saying you are wrong; just providing another perspective. When every penny you *spend* or *save* is taxed, you end up paying more than 50% of what you made to The Man. Either tax the income or tax the spending, not both, is my argument.

The world extends beyond the US and there are places in the EU where a 50–55% marginal tax rate is a thing.

I’m not against paying taxes at all, my comment was about MS (in that case) making over 300bn and paying 0.00$ of taxes while individuals make 10–100k and pay significantly more taxes than MS Ireland did on their 300bn. I don’t think that’s fair. Furthermore, individuals are unable to make business deductions that MS and other companies can (and spend pretax dollars to buy things while the rest of us spends after tax dollars)

My post was to point out that corporations are massively advantaged in comparison with actual, alive human beings.

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