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Comment by weberer | Hacker News Reader

>The poorest 10% of Americans pay more – 25.6%.

Is that correct? I thought anyone below the poverty line paid 0% income tax, and would just have to pay sales tax. And property tax, gas tax, social security tax, and inflation, which is a secret hidden tax. But still, 25% sounds high.

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This is a disingenous take. They are comparing the marginal rate on the poorest 10% of Americans without deductions applied to the rate after all deductions and tax avoidance of billionaires. Most of the bottom 10% pay very little in income tax.

Inflation isn’t a secret hidden tax for any definition of tax outside of the general “it’s a burden of some sort” in which case time to fill forms, waiting at the bus stop for a bus to arrive, stuck in traffic, etc are all “secret hidden” taxes.

Inflation in general is not a tax; inflation due to the issuance of fiat money certainly is a tax.

By printing more money, the government gains money by reducing the value of money in everyone else's accounts. Its effectively a flat tax on holding cash.

There's also Social Security, Medicare and SDI (State Disability Insurance)

Hard to say. It looks like this article has been republished in several different outlets but originally came from the AP[1]. At first glance they appear to cite the statistic as coming from the EU Tax Observatory, but it's worded in such a way that the provenance may only apply to a prior fact:

> In the United States, [the EU Tax Observatory] says, billionaires pay an effective average tax rate of 23%, including all taxes at all levels of government. The poorest 10% of Americans pay more – 25.6%.

I was unable to locate any such figure in the Tax Observatory's data atlas[2] -- I've included the relevant lines for their latest U.S. effective tax rate estimates below. As you can see, they're not broken down by income percentile and also lack the expected decimal precision:

    USA 2020 0.31 Total_tax_NDP
    USA 2020 0.11 Corporate_tax_rate
    USA 2020 0.27 Labor_tax_rate
    USA 2020 0.30 Capital_tax_rate

It's possible that the statistic is instead buried in one of their publications[3], but I was not able to find relevant mentions of "25.6"/".256" in any of the recent reports. This particular NGO seems mostly focused on EU corporate taxation rather than American labor taxation... so I wouldn't be surprised if the fact source is actually some other uncited party.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/tax-corporations-global-havens-eu...

[2]: "Effective tax rates on capital and labor": https://atlas-offshore.world/download-data/

[3]: https://www.taxobservatory.eu/publications/

If you add up the employer and employee portion of payroll taxes (social security + Medicare), it’s probably close to 25%.

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