come again?
Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
31–40 of 160 posts
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#32This seems beyond misleading it doesn't even have a method to enter most of the now illegal methods to lower your tax bill. Tax straddles were only banned in 1977 before that you should have easily been able to more then halve your tax bill with futures.
Tax straddles—now illegal—is a new concept to me. A couple old articles about it from New York Times:
Looking for Tax Losses in Commodities (1977) https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/11/archives/investing-lookin...
I.R.S. Wins On Tax Straddles (1982) https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/10/business/irs-wins-on-tax-...
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#33That's brilliant work, thanks! Imagine if IRS would produce something like this (open sourced) and we could file our returns like this.
Imagine if the tax code itself were written in Python.
def computeTax(**kwargs):
.. blah blah ..
return how_much_you_owe
from scipy.optimize import minimizeRe: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#34Are 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?
Yes, the marginal income taxes were high but the capital gain taxes were low, so the rich didn't pay much. For example when the top income tax was 91% in the 1950s the capital gain tax was just 25%. See the historical top income and capital gain tax rates here https://ctj.org/pdf/regcg.pdf
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quick google shows that yes, there was a 70% marginal tax rate (applying to income over $108,300 - not inflation adjusted - for a single filer) as recently as 1981 https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...
But nobody ever paid it as there were millions of loopholes.
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 1970s there were massive tax deductions that don't exist today, so the actual tax incidence was much lower than what is implied by the marginal tax rates. There was a major overhaul of the tax code in the 1980s that simultaneously eliminated many of the tax deductions and offset that loss of deductions with lower the marginal tax rates. The change was approximately revenue neutral but made the tax code simpler…
seems like this would render the website pretty useless for anything before that period, right?
No post body was provided.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#37This is great. Could you add a box that displays effective tax rate and marginal rate?
It would also be great to provide a line graph that shows the result for all years. There’s no reason to have to select each year one-by-one.
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#38That's brilliant work, thanks! Imagine if IRS would produce something like this (open sourced) and we could file our returns like this.
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
In 2014, the Policy Simulation Library [1] added a model called Tax-Simulator [2], which is a Python reimplementation of TAXSIM [3][4]. It is available as open-source [5], and designed to let researchers both change existing policy variables and implement new tax reforms in Python.
[2] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/
[3] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html
[4] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc...
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#39This calculator doesn't seem to support local income taxes, which many states have [1]. For example Maryland has income tax brackets than other states, but each county levies its own income tax on top of that. I usually use smartasset's income tax calculator [2], which also asks for your location so it can factor in any local income taxes as needed.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/cities-that-levy-income-taxes-319... [2] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes
Re: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
#40This is very interesting. I learned that the last year I made enough money to pay AMT is the year they got rid of AMT. Damn!
No one "got rid" of AMT, it is still alive and well in both the federal tax code and some states, such as California.
In fact, it is more popular than ever: the temporary TCJA tax changes (2018-2025) for individuals mostly consisted of moving features of AMT into the regular tax regime. No personal exemptions, large standard deduction, no mortgage interest deduction for equity debt, limited state and local tax (SALT) deduction, mostly no miscellaneous itemized deductions, flatter tax brackets, etc.