[extropy-chat] Europe vs America (was Depressing thought....)

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 01:51, rand-y wrote:

> People who make 23K and under are generally taxed at about 23-27% from
> their paycheck, and other taxes or fees generally amount to about
> 7-13%. Those are rough approximations.  So the bottom half of AMerican
> earners lose about maybe about 27-33% of their pay to taxes. And what
> do they get for their taxes? That is really the big question.
> 
> Those in the 50-70 percentile range, with incomes of 23K-35K, roughly,
> lose about 33-37% of their income to all taxation. 
> 
I always thought the US had a pretty low tax rate, but your post and
others seem to indicate otherwise.  Googling up US tax rates, federal
taxes for a single person at 23k would be a touch under 14%, and state
taxes vary widely but i'll assume a median of about 3-4% for a single
23k'er.  Could you give me details on what the fees and other taxes that
make up the missing 15%-19%?  (just to clarify, this is a genuine
question, and i'm not claiming your figures are wrong.  The little i
know of US taxation is what i've gathered from an hour of googling
around)
alejandro