This is great!
If you’re taking feature requests I’d love to see a bar or line chart showing the amount of taxes paid for the Y axis and year on the X axis. Would make comparing over time much easier.
Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
101–110 of 160 posts
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if the tax code itself were written in Python. def computeTax(**kwargs): .. blah blah .. return how_much_you_owe Of course we all know what comes next... from scipy.optimize import minimize
It has been proposed in professional tax forums that this is in fact how tax code should be legislated, using some kind of pseudo-code. Even just using symbols for things such as >=, <, and so on would eliminate a lot of the garbage in the verbal version.
This would be incredible -- it feels like the tax form documentation is written in a dialect of Accounting English from the 50s, and just little things like adding some parentheses to group and/or con/disjunctions would go a long ways.
Nearly every year I don't feel confident that I've filled out my taxes accurately, and it's not for lack of trying.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#103The tax is not accurate historically, for higher income brackets. Prior to 2018(?) you could deduct the majority of your state income tax from the federal income tax (the "Trump tax cuts"). https://nypost.com/2021/10/05/court-upholds-trump-law-limiti... Basically, prior to that implementation, you were really paying MAX(federal income tax, state income tax). After that implementation, you could only deduct a maximum…
I don't believe you're calculating the pre law change correctly. You could deduct your state tax from your income for federal tax purposes. So if you made 100k and paid 17k in state taxes, your federal AGI was 83k. Post change, it would have been 90k. The Trump era change was really a fuck you to high earners in states with high taxes. Shockingly, a majority of those people tended to vote for the Democratic Party.
Funnily enough, that SALT deduction was disliked by economists, as regressive, inefficient and mostly pointless. It was bashed by policy think tanks from all sides, e.g. Brookings, CRFB, Heritage, CBPP, and Center for American Progress.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#104I wonder whether it would be easier to get Fortran in the browser with f2c ( http://www.netlib.org/f2c/ ) then C to WASM. I had excellent results with f2c on an old Fortran program when I used it.
Thanks for sharing this! I tried it and indeed it works quite well.
This will be much simpler/easier than gfortran+dragonegg, and removes some roadblocks preventing me from using the latest emscripten/llvm.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You did have to be wealthy, but $100,000 in 1980 is equivalent to $383,000 today which is pretty wealthy. So it’s basically income above $400,000 today. And many of the tax “loopholes” involved real estate investment which would be accessible at that income level.
$380k is not wealthy. Most people can live just fine on $380k, don’t get me wrong, but it is basically upper middle class. If $380k/yr is wealthy then what is $20 million/yr?
> then what is $20 million/yr?
obscenely rich
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#106Are all the dollar amounts in the simulated tax output at the top of the page inflation adjusted? For example, I inputted married, with no dependents with $500,000 salary and in 1977, the federal amount was $299,864 and in 2020 was $133,947. I assume these amounts can be compared without further adjusting for inflation? Tangentially, did federal taxes really come down that much?
The top tax bracket in 1913, the first year of the federal income tax as it exists today, was equivalent to ~14 million dollars at today's value.
Our wealth inequality problems could largely be solved by fixing the tax brackets (especially w.r.t. capital gains). We don't need all sorts of new taxes, certainly not a wealth tax, before fixing the obvious problem.
That being said, $500,000 should have been taxed more heavily in 1977 relative to today in a perfect world, because that amount of money was worth a lot more back then. I don't think the numbers are inflation adjusted or it would make sense to do so without a big warning.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#107I made tiny typo (an extra digit in spouse age) and got a giant error, though at least it was actionable “TAXSIM: Unbelievable spouse age”
This error message is hilarious, so I tried to find where the threshold is.
Apparently it's not believable that people 115 years or older would be filing taxes.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
$380k is not wealthy. Most people can live just fine on $380k, don’t get me wrong, but it is basically upper middle class. If $380k/yr is wealthy then what is $20 million/yr?
While technically a better term for assets than income, we'll continue to use "wealthy". You should realize that multiple things can be wealthy. $380k is wealthy and $20M is also wealthy. $20M is wealthier than $380k. Im the US, an income of $380k is the 99th percentile. In a higher COL state of California, an income of $380k is still in the 99th percentile. And for the very high COL city of San Francisco, an income…
I think you should not be redefining what words mean to make your argument.
Wealthy means to have wealth. Wealth is the abundance of financial assets. Income can become wealth if saved/invested, but it is not wealth.
There are numerous definitions of middle class, with many being "not upper, not lower". Upper class is defined as those that have the most wealth (explicitly not income) and political power.
$People with 380k of income, but without significant assets are not upper class. They would be considered upper middle class.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wealthy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#109Bit late to the party but I just wanted to put one top level comment saying: this is awesome! I'd never have thought that putting a Fortran codebase like this into WASM was so possible. And doing so in this way surfaces great, battle-tested information, that would be herculean to reimplement and test in another language. Really awesome stuff!
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number of possible inputs for Income is stunning: 15 types of income in total. There are “only” 5 possible inputs under Deductions & Credits but 3 of them are categories with several subitems: Itemized Deductions • Home mortgage interest • Deductible medical expenses • Motor Vehicle registration fees • Charitable contributions • Casulty or Theft losses Other Itemized Deductions • Other state and local taxes • Ded…
Because standard deduction is so high now, 90% of US tax filers do not have to worry about itemizing. According to IRS stats website, which I do not have handy on my phone.
Hat tip on the reference. I didn't consider the effect.
I found an article about it here: https://taxfoundation.org/standard-deduction-itemized-deduct...