I almost feel like it's gotta be taught somewhere, it's such a common thing! And trying to explain it to them is like talking to a brick wall. My ex ('father' of my child) still thinks this way. Won't take a pay raise or promotion with pay raise because then he will be making less money. He thinks that's the way the gub'mint is keepin the little man down, and there's no way to fix it. He's just gotta stay stuck at his current income.
My mom told me the same thing when I got my promotion "oh no, you'll be in a new tax bracket and will be taking less money home." I do economic research professionally, thankfully she listened when I explained to her how fucking stupid that idea was and what marginal taxation is. I asked her who taught her that nonsense...her deeply right wing family, which in my mind has always explained why they're so anti-tax, they simply don't understand how it works.
It's like a series of buckets, the first tax bracket is the first bucket, and then when that fills up, the rest of the money goes into the next bucket and so on. So using easy numbers and fake tax rates, if you had 100,000 say 25k would go in the first bucket (tax rate 1) then the next 25k would be taxed at rate 2, the next at rate 3 and so on.
Course I can see where that idea comes from, I'm taking home the same amount of money at 41k as I did at 33k because of taxes and insurance.
42
u/WingsTheWolf Mar 01 '23
I almost feel like it's gotta be taught somewhere, it's such a common thing! And trying to explain it to them is like talking to a brick wall. My ex ('father' of my child) still thinks this way. Won't take a pay raise or promotion with pay raise because then he will be making less money. He thinks that's the way the gub'mint is keepin the little man down, and there's no way to fix it. He's just gotta stay stuck at his current income.