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Comment by sarah2079 | Hacker News Reader

sarah2079

I like this a lot, it is a really nice way of seeing the data. I would also be interested to see:

- A version with the income on a logarithmic scale to make it extend past $300k in a sensible way. (Not because I need it, I just want to know how the changes affect taxes in the higher ranges).

- A plot of % increase in taxes vs. income. There are some poor sods on the left hand side of the graph who seem to be getting an almost 50% tax increase. Is that really true?

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Here's a series of charts that show what percentage of income taxes are paid by each group (top 1%, 5%, 10%, etc) and their overall share of total income. As you can see the top 1% earn about 20% of total income but pay 40% of all income taxes.

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-e...

Here is a better series of charts that doesn't just look at federal taxes, but instead the whole tax burden:

See: http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2012/04/who_pays_taxes_in_america....

The total tax burden is pretty flat in the top 40%, and actually goes down marginally from top 5% to top 1% (and probably to top 0.1% if that were shown on the chart). The burden on the middle 20% at 25.2% isn't dramatically lower than the burden on the top 1% at 29.0%, but the burden on the bottom 20% is lower at 17.4%.

In all it's pretty fair if you ask me.

Yeah, this is a much more complete picture. Not including payroll and state taxes gives very misleading results.

Regarding your 2nd question: A 50% increase in taxes sounds accurate. This is only because those on the left hand side of the graph pay little to no personal income tax. The largest tax they pay is the Social Security Tax, which is set to increase from 4.2% to 6.2% -- nearly a 50% increase.

I realize their starting tax was low, but I still feel much sadder about the $1000 tax increase for a married couple earning $25k combined than my (cough) times greater tax increase.

Essentially. At the lower end of the scale the majority of tax paid is FICA, which is almost increasing by 50%. I don't know how tax credits will affect the refund situation at the end of the year, but this will be the actual effect on paychecks.

FICA is not going up by almost 50%. It's 5.65% vs 7.65%. That's 35%. FICA also has no deductions or credits: The rate you see is what you pay (and your employer pays the same amount).

The rest of the hit is the expiration of the 10% bracket from the Bush tax cuts. That saved 5% of the first $8400 of taxable income (from the old, larger 15% bracket).

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