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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Even that's tricky, as moving from $7/hour to $15/hour means you lose things like SNAP/Food Stamp benefits, jump from a 10% to a 12% tax bracket, etc.

Edit: Perhaps the ~$13k standard deduction is a better example line than the tax bracket. Just stating the wage growth isn't outpacing inflation as much as it might appear at first glance.

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Not sure why this is down voted.

Here's a chart from the NY Times showing what it looks like in practice: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/10/opinion/10coy-new...

-- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/opinion/benefits-cliff-we...

For low wage people with children, they really are often better off in a low wage job than a middle wage job. In the example given, going from 25K a year to 50K would mean a lower standard of living.

The war on poverty has been a miserable failure.

The snap qualification might be significant. The jump in tax brackets, probably not. Only the money above the 10% bracket gets an additional 2% (12%) tax.

The tax bracket myth gets told to labor to keep their wages down. And it sticks! People get upset about raises!

I wasn't suggesting upping the wage was a bad idea, just that saying wage growth at the bottom outpacing inflation isn't as good as it's portrayed. The $~13k standard deduction is another example line that gets crossed. Medicaid and CHIP maximum income is another. Meaning we could use more wage growth, not less.

I think that's an important point that too many people gloss over, and I want to emphasize it with an example. Let's say the cutoff between 10 and 12 percent brackets is at 10k. If you make 10k one year, you pay $1000 in taxes. If you make $10,001 the next year, you don't pay $1,200.12; you pay $1,000.12. 10% on the first 10k, and 12% on the single dollar that you earned in that bracket.

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