
Check your US tax rate for 2012—and every year since 1913 - Cbasedlifeform
http://qz.com/37639/check-your-us-tax-rate-for-2012-and-every-year-since-1913/
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whalesalad
This website is atrocious! If you scroll up or down slightly (easy to do with
a touchpad or magic mouse) it loads another post.

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citricsquid
21.5% on $100k, are US taxes really that low?

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Shivetya
Sad to think that people feel taking a fifth of a persons productive output is
low. Throw in city and state taxes and burdens can be pretty abysmal. Throw in
on top of that all the embedded taxes in nearly every item you buy today and I
wonder where our true tax load is.

The US does not have a taxing problem, it has a spending problem. Even if the
President got his wishes his tax increase on the "rich" would not net more
that the US deficit spends in ONE month. If you tax 400K+ it only returns a
possible 70 billion more PER YEAR!.

Worse, instead of using these taxes to reduce the deficit they already have
new spending lined up.

So, sorry I feel that even twenty percent is pretty bad. It means for over a
fifth of the year I am not working for myself. Since my effective is near
thirty percent I spend an incredible amount of time working for someone else.

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ry0ohki
No to mention us self employed entrepreneurs who pay the "self employment tax"

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maxerickson
The self employment tax is no less fair than the employer side of social
security taxes.

The only difference is it doesn't use silly accounting to hide the tax from
the employee.

It does seem to be the case that the chart omits the ~15% tax that goes to
social security and medicare (well, 15% for people earning under the limit).
So even the federal taxes on $100,000 are quite some more than 21%.

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jacobn
The extremely high tax rates in the fifties and sixties give a misleading
impression of the overall tax burden for high earners:
[http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732470510...](http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.html)

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nhebb
The tax freedom day chart - <http://taxfoundation.org/tax-topics/tax-freedom-
day> (scroll down a bit) is a better metric because in looks at all the taxes
for the average taxpayer.

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smcl
It would be nice if your after-tax pay was included in the chart alongside
your tax rate and inflation-adjusted income.

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slykat
Anyone know why tax rates heavily spiked in 1941 - 1942? Is this due to World
War 2?

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JoshTriplett
Yup. Notice the similar spike around World War I. Also notice that the spike
went back down fairly soon after World War I, but after World War II they
pretty much stayed at the increased level; rather than decreasing spending and
taxes back to pre-war levels, the government just found other ways to spend it
and continue growing.

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timr
_"rather than decreasing spending and taxes back to pre-war levels, the
government just found other ways to spend it and continue growing."_

Well golly, let's not let facts get in the way of a good story. The federal
government had a _huge_ debt to pay down after the war. The debt as a fraction
of GDP spiked to an all-time high after WWII, and steadily declined until the
late 70s. The higher taxes were going toward that debt.

Then we dramatically cut taxes in the late 70s, and the debt started climbing
again.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt>

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JoshTriplett
> The federal government had a huge debt to pay down after the war.

Granted, but if spending had otherwise returned to the previous levels then
that debt would have gone away entirely and then the new taxes along with it.
That rather obviously didn't happen. :)

A now-deleted sibling comment linked to the corresponding spending levels,
which confirm the continued spending (note that this graph _doesn't_ even
include the debt):
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Us_gov_spendi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Us_gov_spending_histry_by_function_1902_2010.png)

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jellicle
Among other things, the government was building the free interstate highway
system and a shitload of free public schools for the baby boom generation.

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bunderbunder
I suspect neither of those was anywhere near as expensive as funding the Cold
War.

