A recent article on ABCNews.com quotes individuals who are interested in reducing their incomes by just enough to avoid earning over $250,000 this year because they fear the tax increases (a.k.a. repeal of Bush tax cuts) that Obama plans to implement. Of course, families earning less than $250,000 will see “not one dime” of additional taxes, as anybody who has seen Obama speak in the past year or so knows.
Obviously, earning nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year does not mean that you understand the tax code, since the US has a marginal tax rate, meaning that only earnings over $250,000 are taxed at the higher rate. Thankfully, a new version of the article explains this.
Possibly because of the arcane procedures for filing taxes in the US, issues such as these are not easily understood. It will be interesting to see how my own taxes are affected by the process of going from a barely-paid graduate student to a reasonably-paid assistant professor.
Memoirs of a SLACer 