Comment by wredcoll
1 month ago
> pressures of high taxes
This is something I never see mentioned so I'm curious what brought it up. Are you personally paying a lot of taxes or so much that you can't afford other things or is this a thing peers talk about? Is this a state or federal thing?
Taxes are pretty significant at the lower incomes. Not only are they paying 15-25% taxes after considering local, federal, state, and property taxes (even though federal are low) but whenever they want services from anyone in the upper quintiles they are also effectively paying the regulatory and tax burden of those enterprises since the customer ultimately assumes all the costs of the business.
Think for a second, if someone wants child care -- they must pay enough not only to satisfy the worker's basic needs but also the worker's income tax, business taxes, property taxes of the daycare, government mandated licensing and bonding, etc. None of those get recorded as 'taxes' the person contracting that service has paid, but really they are also paying those.
Given how little most of the lower pay workers have extra to work with, and how little they get in government services for what they pay, I don't think it's much a stretch for them to think taxes are holding them back. Being able open up saving even couple percent of income massively improves your financial safety and cushion at those brackets.
I totally am paying a massive amount of capital gains taxes! I’m also saving up for a house which means every dollar I don’t contribute to a down payment becomes principal and interest on a mortgage which equals even more money out of my pocket. For instance if I pay $37k in capital gains one year (which I did) and if my principal on a $500k house is $200k at 6% and $1500 monthly payments I’ll have to pay $33k in interest on just the $37k I didn’t pay up front!
Some cursory googling shows you have to make capital gains of between $185,000 and $250,000 to have to pay $37,000 in capital gains tax. This is between three and six times as much as someone in their 20s will earn in a year. I think you need a bit more perspective of what it's like to be a young person outside the extremely well compensated tech sector.
Ironically, capital gains tax rates are essentially regressive as they are lower than the typical marginal tax rate for someone earning at those levels. They are a big handout to the capital class, not some special punishment.
So to whine about them shows a baseline belief that income should not be taxed at all, I guess?
I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.
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Don't the vast majority of young people entering the workforce have no capital gains to deal with at all? That tends to be more of a problem for people who are already well off. Are you talking about a narrower demographic or something?
The amounts you paid in capital gains are about 50% higher than I've ever paid. That was the second year I worked at a big tech company and suddenly had stock, which was about a decade into an my extremely lucrative career as a software developer. Most of my friends don't have to deal with capital gains at all because they're not part of the investor class. On average the rates of trading must be much lower for people in their 20s, no?
Dear lord, what percentage of the Gen Z (the population mentioned in the article) do you think pay capital gain taxes???
Congrats I guess, you are clearly rich enough to pay taxes. Most young people would consider themselves lucky to have $5K to rub together.
I hate to be uncharitable but the comment seems to simply be parroting conservative talking points, rather than being an accurate (or sincere) representation of young people's pessimism about the future.
> high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages
Anyone I talk to under 40 despairs at low wages, rising prices, and a political class that is incapable of going after blatant corruption, especially those identified in the Epstein files.
There is more anger at capitalism and billionaires (capitalists in the Marxist sense) than in any time in living memory. The notion that young people are generally upset about regulation, entitlement and H1B visas is laughably out of touch. It might be true for a tiny number of spoiled techies in the Bay Area! But outside SF, Seattle and NYC, young people are angry about a lot of things, and strong regulation and generous benefits are about the last of them.