Someone explain taxes to me

[Reeve]

Plenty of "poor" people spend their time counting the minutes till they can go home.

So you're making the assertion that because SOME poor people are lazy, that the statement that "wealthy people don't work any harder than anyone else" is false? SOME wealthy people work harder than SOME poor people. And SOME poor people work harder than SOME rich people.

In fact, most of the truly poor people I've known worked their asses off, finished their work for the day at one job, then went across town to work their asses off at a second job.

[Hatelocker]

Working hard does not equal succcess most of the time. Assuming you work in private business your salary/compensation is much more directly correlated to how much income you bring in or save the company. For example, a guy at a fast food joint serves food and helps bring in the company a few thousand dollars a day but it took a staff of 6 employees to do so and so each person brought in say $600/per if you split it up. That money needs to be split to pay rent, food costs, utility bills, etc. So, therefore he can only be paid a fairly minimal wage or the company will not turn a profit (net- lets assume the company profits $200 per employee per day). Next, take a salesman, lawyer, engineer etc. and they on average may be able to bring in thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a day. So, lets say that guy brings in $3,000 a day on average. Still have fixed costs and thats prob a few hundred a day or even $1,000/day for support staff, rent, computers and the like. That leaves $2,000/day to be split between profit and the guys paycheck. Therefore you can give him $1,500/day of that money and the rest goes to profit. In example 2 the guy makes probably 15 times what the first guy makes but the company makes more money per day per employee of this caliber. Hard to find employees who can make this type of money (while very easy to find a guy to flip burgers) and so the well educated guy can demand a large portion of the money he brings in.

Simple supply and demand

[Bridgetjones]

Not reading through 11 pages of people arguing about federal taxes.

@OP: He got taxed more because overtime hours are taxed at a much higher rate than standard income hours. In effect, an overtime hour will usually end up netting you something close to your gross hourly rate.

[Spectral]

In fact, most of the truly poor people I've known worked their asses off, finished their work for the day at one job, then went across town to work their asses off at a second job.

I can't agree with that. Most of the truly poor people I've known were lazy as shit.

Lower middle class people, on the other hand, work pretty damned hard.

[Cybran]

So you're making the assertion that because SOME poor people are lazy, that the statement that "wealthy people don't work any harder than anyone else" is false? SOME wealthy people work harder than SOME poor people. And SOME poor people work harder than SOME rich people

So Endus was wrong and my first post was right. Neato.

The biggest problem with taxes is how they get spend. Usually they get wasted to secure votes.

[Reeve]

So Endus was wrong and my first post was right. Neato.

Sounds like you and I are interpreting Endus's comments differently then, because what I got from his comment is that wealthy people (as a group) don't work any harder than anyone else (as a group). That, as a general statement, is probably true. They may work as hard as non-wealthy people, but probably not any harder.

[Endus]

So Endus was wrong and my first post was right. Neato.

Only if you don't read what I actually said and just invent a straw man to pretend I said.

You claimed wealthy people work harder than poor people. That was false, and nothing Reeve posted suggested otherwise.

Sure, there are poor people who sit on welfare and don't care. There's also wealthy heirs who don't contribute anything of worth, or people who invest their money and live off dividends and interest. How hard you work is not a direct correlation with the money you make, was the point.

[Dakia]

Yes, true. The idea that if you work hard, you'll become wealthy? Just a flat-out lie. Most truly wealthy people have been primarily lucky, not hard-working.

Endus, I usually respect your arguments, but this is something for which you have absolutely no basis in fact. Neither does anyone who says that one income class of person works hard than any other or is lazier than any other. It really is a tired argument that needs to stop being pushed as fact.

Sure, some poor people are lazy. Others are also really hard working. The same is true of the rich and anyone in between.

[Reeve]

I can't agree with that. Most of the truly poor people I've known were lazy as shit.

Lower middle class people, on the other hand, work pretty damned hard.

Eh, it's anecdotal for both of us. The people I knew who were relatively poor were either the busboys at the restaurant I used to manage, most of whom had 2-3 jobs, and worked their asses off at my restaurant, or they were poor farmer types in third world countries. The farmer types I saw in Bolivia worked their asses off, and the women in Mozambique worked their asses off (the men mostly sat under a tree and drank gin).

[antelope591]

Try getting 3000 and having 800+ taken out for taxes -_-. I love Canada but its def the worst thing about living here esp since everything costs more than in the US too

[Reeve]

Try getting 3000 and having 800+ taken out for taxes -_-. I love Canada but its def the worst thing about living here esp since everything costs more than in the US too

That's probably similar to what you would have taken out in the US, if you account for health insurance premiums here. Possibly it's less.

[Endus]

Endus, I usually respect your arguments, but this is something for which you have absolutely no basis in fact.

No basis in fact? We're talking about truly wealthy people here, upper class types, not middle class like doctors and lawyers. They're people who got lucky; they were perhaps lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family, and thus had family contacts and a nest egg to build on. Perhaps they had a lucky windfall from a lottery or the like. Perhaps they made investments that worked out well (and I stand by that being "luck" more than skill, or every stock broker would be stupidly rich and not need to work for a living, not to mention Warren Buffet says much the same thing).

There's a heavy dose of luck in there, at some stage. They may work hard too; there's a big difference between a lottery winner who squanders it in 6 months, and a lottery winner who secures it in solid investments to sustain themselves in perpetuity. But there's some luck involved, too. In how you got started, in who you met, etc. Plenty of people just don't get lucky, and fail to succeed as a result of that.


Heck, look at the publishing industry. Plenty of books that are now considered classics were outright refused by a dozen publishers or more, before someone took a chance. Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, was rejected something like 30 times, and he threw it in the trash. His wife pulled it out and made him keep going. Getting that first sale involves a lot of luck; had the next publisher decided to take a pass like the others, or had his wife not saved it when he threw it out, things would have played out very differently. His continued success is absolutely the result of King's work, but that initial chance was down to luck, and he almost missed it.

Luck is almost always a factor to success. It's not just hard work, and those who claim it is are deluding themselves.

[antelope591]

That's probably similar to what you would have taken out in the US, if you account for health insurance premiums here. Possibly it's less.

Really? I was always under the impression we paid a lot more taxes than the US. Does it vary state by state?

[Masark]

Secondly there is ALREADY a private company sending people into space soon. Its called Virgin Galactic

And you holding up Virgin as doing something useful proves beyond doubt that you have no clue what you're talking about WRT space.

Virgin's spaceshiptwo only goes to space in technical terms. It hits 100km altitude. It's a high-speed, high-altitude joyride for people with money to burn.

It doesn't do anything actually useful. It doesn't get anywhere near fast enough to attain orbit or anything else of practical use.

The people doing useful stuff would be SpaceX. But guess where most of their money comes from. I'll give you a hint, it starts with an N, ends with an A and there's another A and an S in there too.

Really? I was always under the impression we paid a lot more taxes than the US. Does it vary state by state?

Yes. It also varies by province up here too.

[Reeve]

Really? I was always under the impression we paid a lot more taxes than the US. Does it vary state by state?

It does vary by state because of state taxes, but more than that, in the US, our employers pay healthcare premiums for us (if you're a full time employee), which can run into the hundreds per month. If you have a family you want to have covered under your insurance, that can run several more hundred dollars per month of employee contribution. That's basically wages that we never get to see. So you may pay more in actual tax money (though in California the tax is probably pretty similar to what you posted there), but we also have to pay for our healthcare, while yours is part of your taxes.

[antelope591]

And you holding up Virgin as doing something useful proves beyond doubt that you have no clue what you're talking about WRT space.

Virgin's spaceshiptwo only goes to space in technical terms. It hits 100km altitude. It's a high-speed, high-altitude joyride for people with money to burn.

It doesn't do anything actually useful. It doesn't get anywhere near fast enough to attain orbit or anything else of practical use.

The people doing useful stuff would be SpaceX. But guess where most of their money comes from. I'll give you a hint, it starts with an N, ends with an A and there's another A and an S in there too.



Yes. It also varies by province up here too.

True but the variation isn't that significant...except Alberta with their oil money -_-

[Endus]

Really? I was always under the impression we paid a lot more taxes than the US. Does it vary state by state?

It varies a bit by state in the US, and a bit by province in Canada. But Canadians really don't spend that much more in taxes than the US;
http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2012/...ates-for-2011/

Pay particular attention to the graphs they include. That's looking strictly at federal tax rates. The idea that Canadians are much more heavily taxed than Americans is basically a meme that doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

[Reeve]

True but the variation isn't that significant...except Alberta with their oil money -_-

To give an idea of the variation, Texas has no state income tax, while California has tax rates ranging from 1.25% to 10.55% depending on your income. You'd probably pay 5% in CA based on your income, on top of around 20% federally, and your health insurance which is covered by taxes in Canada, but not in the US.

[Bridgetjones]

I'll just leave this here:

http://www.itep.org/whopays/

Anyone who says the rich pay more in TOTAL taxes can't add or read.

Edit: This doesn't refer to "federal income tax only," which is the isolated tax the right uses to fabricate poor little rich people. This map also does not refer to "total tax dollars collected," which is another isolated statistic the right likes to trot out to pretend the wealthy are overburdened. This map refers to holistic, real, effective tax rates on income. Without cherry-picking stats, the poor and middle class pay a higher percentage of income at the state level. Hopefully this explains why federal rates are much more progressive to act as a balance.

[Deleted]

It baffles me how people say the gouvernement is stealing from people to support the poorly people who are to lazy to take a job.

My job, roughly taken, focusses on those people who can't seem to get along with todays society. Those people can be mentally ill, handicapped, addicts and should I go on? These people deserve a life with minimum lifestandards. We provide for them, like they would provide for us if we would have a struck of bad luck. Everyone in their life will come to a point where they just don't want to live anymore, and with our taxmoney they support those people into better lives.