What do you do that you pay >60% of your income in taxes? I'm self employed and hit ~%30.
Are you only talking federal or fully loaded? Do you only look at withholding or do you factor in any refunds? Do you include sales tax? What about increases to the prices of goods you buy due to corporate taxes? Capitol gains on your investments? Various fees that are paid to the government? The cost of compliance with regulations that you wouldn't of done otherwise? What about fines, commonly a large revenue generator in rural areas? Property taxes? Higher prices due to governmentally enforced monopolies? Devaluation of your holdings due to the printing of more currency?
To start we must first agree on what we are counting.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...
Social Security taxes
Medicare taxes
State income taxes
Local income taxes
State/local real property taxes
State/local personal property taxes
Sales taxes
It's pretty easy to get to 50 or 60%, depending on how much you make and what state you live in.
It's really, really not. You'd have to be making high 7 or low 8 figures in ordinary income annually and own expensive real estate and spend a shit ton of money on other stuff that has sales taxes.
Tax rates aren't additive. A 40% top federal bracket and a 10% top state bracket don't result in 50% of your actual income going to taxes.
Our household is in the top 5% (not even top 1%) nationally, living in a medium-tax state, and we managed to max out the SALT deduction. Practically speaking, this means that for the portion of income taxed by state and local authorities resulting in taxes in excess of 10k, we are also (doubly) taxed by the federal government. It truly is (partially) additive.
We can all thank the Trump "tax cuts" for that.
> It truly is (partially) additive.
On that portion of your income. I reiterate what I said earlier. To have an actual effective 50% tax rate, you need to be earning well over $1m. That's not "easy" or a typical case.
Unless you own an absolute shitton of property and have an abnormally high property tax liability relative to your income, in which case you have an abnormal financial situation that isn't generalizable to other people.
Maybe this is typical if you're a landlord and your source of income is mostly real property, but that's not a typical situation either.
Also, Congress doesn't have much control over state sales taxes, property taxes, etc.
It varies by state, but on average for the top 1%, it looks like average effective tax rate in the US comes out to around 38-39%
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/unequal-state-tax-burdens/
https://www.getrichslowly.org/effective-tax-rates/
I’m not sure how to get 50% - 60%… maybe that’s referring to your top marginal tax bracket?
Once you include sales taxes (which are 12% in a jurisdiction not far from my home) and property taxes (which aren't taken against income but are still taxes), it's not hard to get to a 50-60% total tax burden (across all tax authorities).