The Stealth Tax

Busniness Week ^ | BusinessWeek Feb 10-16, 2004 | Howard Gleckman

[dangus]

>>Further, there is no way someone who makes 30k pays $9,000 in Federal taxes. That would be 30%. That rate is reserved for people with much, much higher incomes than yours.<<

Read my post, "When the President is spending money like a drunken whore, I know my social security and medicare payments are going into the general fund."

In other words, I am including in my federal tax burden the social security and medicare taxes, since the funds I am contributing are being used to pay for items not at all related to medicare or retirement payments.

>>Nowhere does it say someone making 100k pays $3,000 in taxes.<<

That figure is from what the article states that someone earning $100,000 *could* pay as the AMT. By definition, the AMT is instead of the income tax calculation, so if you pay $3000 in AMT, you pay $0 in income tax. However, to be consisten, I should have added the social scurity and Medicare taxes to the AMT.

[dangus]

Actually, the AMT is the simplest tax in the world. It's hard to know how much MORE than AMT is than the income tax, but that's because the income tax is so hard to compute. Once you know you're paying AMT, it ain't nothing at all to figure it out.