I have been waiting for someone to come up with this for a long time now.  Finally, here it is!  You can enter in your current salary and see what percent you would pay in taxes for every year between 1913 and 2012.

There are a few things I would like to point out.  First, look at how much higher the tax rates for top earners has been historically.  During those vastly higher times, there were major economic booms.  This is really all the evidence you need to expose the lies of those that say we need lower taxes on the highest earners in order to grow the economy.  There is no correlation between taxes on high earners and economic growth.  None.

Second, the tax rates in 1982 look very attractive.  This is the year that Ronald Reagan cut taxes.  Yet Republicans can’t even get behind a Democratic proposal that makes tax rates even lower than that for high income earners and much higher than that for low income earners.  Republicans today are determined to inflict as much pain on the lowest earners as possible.  All in the name of Shared Sacrifice.

“Right to work” means that employees can’t be forced to join unions even if there is an organized union.  This has the effect of making unions pretty useless.  Right-to-work laws are basically union busting laws in the disguise of “individual freedom”.  It’s no surprise, then, that there is a very high correlation between strongly Republican states and right-to-work states.

This past year, though, there have been a spate of right-to-work laws passed in non-traditional Republican states.  Well, add the strongest union state in the country to the mix.  Michigan just passed their own right-to-work law.  If this keeps up, unions may cease to exist in the next decade.  Anti-union sentiment is strong even with Democrats; just look at Chicago mayor Rahm Emauel.

The sad thing is, everyone understands the anti-union sentiment.  Unions are often horrible.  They take needed money from hard working individuals and that money often seems to be spent filling the coffers of union officials who are all to often corrupt and don’t give much in return back to the workers.  In fact, the only thing that I can think of that is worse than unions is the companies that make unions necessary in the first place.

And that’s the big problem with anti-union sentiment; it’s so short sighted.  Yes, unions are often horrible, but they do serve a purpose that, at the microeconomic level, seems bad for employees, but at the macroeconomic level, provides huge benefits to all employees.  People are very poor long term planners so they tend to see only the microeconomic implication of decisions.  So, down with unions!

Say you are applying for a job at a company in a right-to-work state that currently has a union.  Here is how that job interview would go:

HR person: Do you plan to join the union?

Applicant: Yes.

HR person: Thank you for your time.

Now say you are a current non-union employee at a company in a right-to-work state that decided to join the union.  Here is how that conversation would go:

Employee:  I’d like to join the union.

HR person: You’re fired.

But keep reaching for the sky, America, soon you’ll be the freedomest of all freedomers.  And by “reaching for the sky”, I mean “digging that ditch”.

Life expectancy in the United States has been gradually increasing for decades now.  The average life expectancy is now up to 78.2 years.  There is a common misconception, however, that all have benefited from that increase equally.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The lower half of the economic spectrum has a much lower life expectancy than the top half.

First, though, let me explain that 78.2 life expectancy number.  Every person born is expected to live to the ripe old age of 78.2.  Obviously, not everyone makes it.  That number takes into consideration babies that die at 1 month of age and managers that die of a heart attack at 50.  A lot of the rise in the life expectancy in the United States is really just a drop in the infant mortality rates and better health related outcomes.  This is as it should be, but it can cause confusion in people because your life expectancy at age 65 changes quite a bit from your life expectancy at birth.

Keep that explanation in mind when you read the Social Security Administration’s “Trends in Mortality” study.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in there, but we’re interested in tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 shows that a person in the lower half economic bracket born in 1912 was expected to live to 77 on average whereas one born in 1941 is expected to live to 80. That’s almost a 4% increase.  An upper half person born in 1912 was expected to live to 79 while one born in 1941 is expected to live to 86.  That’s almost a 9% increase.  So the lower half has experienced less than half the life expectancy increases of the upper half.

Table 4 shows the same data in a different way.  It shows how many years left a person has to live at various ages broken down by top and bottom half economic brackets as well as the difference in the number of years left between the two.

The full retirement age is already scheduled to raise to 67 in a few years.  There is lots of talk about raising it even further to solve minor problems that are easily fixable in other ways.  This is an incredibly bad idea.  If it happens, we may actually see the life expectancy of the lower economic half of the population drop as people work themselves to death.

Ok, listen up, you masses that worship the job creators.  You know how you think that raising the tax rate on the richest people will doom our economy to another recession?  Would you be surprised if I told you that this is complete toro caca?

Well it is.

How do I know this?  Economic history.  Tax rates on top earners have varied anywhere from 25% to 93%.  There is absolutely zero correlation between low tax rates for top earners and good economic performance.  Zero.  Guess when income and capital gains taxes for the top earners were at their lowest?  Just before the Great Depression!  Guess when they were at their highest?  Between 1940 and 1965, some of the best economic times our country has ever had.

I don’t mean to imply that higher taxes on top earners leads to economic growth in the prior paragraph.  What I mean to imply is that the tax rate on those who make well in excess of what they are required to live has absolutely no bearing on how the economy performs.  We could raise taxes on top earners back to 90% and the economy could either thrive or shrink and it would have nothing to do with the fact that the taxes were raised.

We are still fighting at least one war and will be fighting many shadow wars for years to come.  The social safety net could use some mending.  The country’s infrastructure needs huge improvements.  All these things are known to be true to just about every American.  So why are we even arguing about raising the top rate a few measly percentage points?  That’s a rhetorical question, I know the answer.

You see people making this mistake a lot.  Otherwise smart, successful people think that if they make just one more dollar, their tax burden will suddenly shoot up.

This is not, nor has it ever been, how our tax system works.  Here are the current tax brackets:

We’ll do a simple example of a single person.  If you make less than $8,700, you are paying 10% in taxes.  So if you made $5,000 last year, you paid $500 in taxes.  Your effective income tax will always be 10% if you only make $8,700.

Say you made $20,000, though.  What would your taxes be?  Well, that puts you in the 15% tax bracket, but you won’t be paying 15% total.  You will be paying 10% on the first $8,700 and 15% on the next $11,300.  That is $870 and $1,695 for each respective bracket for a total of $2,565 tax burden.  That makes your effective tax rate 12.8%.  Which is about what Mitt Romney pays despite the fact that he makes millions more per year than you.

So, no, if you’re making $390,000 a year instead of $388,000 a year, you’re not going to suddenly own the government a whole lot more money.  And no, there is absolutely no reason to decide to take a vacation just because you are going to advance a tax bracket.

There you have it.  The progressive tax system!  It’s the only tax system that is fair if your definition of fair is making sure your fellow citizens can do things like eat and sleep in a bed.  It’s not so fair if your definition of fair is my money is mine and I got mine jack!