Is it true that Americans are to this day afraid of socialism?

[DonFerrari]

Torillian said:

EnricoPallazzo said:

Sorry I thought we were only talking about gross rates. Net rates will change a lot from person to person. Still its pretty brutal.

Gross rates are just kind of worthless because no one pays them. My gross rate would be 22% federal and 4% state for 26% based solely on gross income but my effective tax rate is actually 20%. Given that most tax systems are progressive there really isn't a point in discussing how crazy high the number no one will pay is. 

Also, I currently pay about 5% of my income on health insurance so raising my taxes by 3-5% and getting me out of paying health insurance or greatly decreasing those payments would be a net benefit to me while also helping people outside myself. 

I can tell you that even though my paygrade would be 27,5% my effective rate is told to be like 18%, but with all the discounts on my paycheck I leave like 40% of my money with the government, and the company also gives an additional 30-40% equivalent of what I earn to the government as well.

For you to have an idea of workers wage versus government gain in Brazil.

For you to pay an employee with minimum wage plus basic benefits (health insurance, transportation and food), the employee end up costing like twice (because of social security, taxes and some other conundrums). Sure when you increase the wage of the employee the amount the company pay to the government in percentual decreases but that is substituted by the what the employee ends up paying for the government.

That is of course only looking at the taxes on the paycheck.

So when you look at the whole tax burden in Brazil they say it is about 40%, but I feel it is over 50%. Like we pay annual tax for keeping a car and an additional tax to use the car (plus high cost of insurance, parking and tool), we pay annual tax for having a house (besides tax to transfer, tax to register and income tax if you have any face value gain on a sale, let's say you bought for 100k and sold for 120k you pay tax on the 20k even if that was just inflation). It is just a very big snowball. And that is ignoring that most services and products have hefty taxes on them (usually over 30%).

example: