> my friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work.
Let me guess: Tax brackets? That's the one thing that most regular workers in the US just don't seem to understand (and arguably, many people knowingly spread falsehoods to further some agenda).
Tax write offs would be my guess. Every employee of charities that partner with retail locations for PoS donations must die a little inside each time some fool confidently asserts that they never give to those charities because it's all a scam. The money, they will assert with the confidence only someone so wrong can muster, is just used for write offs so the executives can have a big bonus and the company gets to claim they donated all the money. Bonus points if they assert that the charity doesn't even get the donated amount.
I think the basic thing about taxes that is least understood is the difference between gross income and taxable income (the latter is the amount that tax brackets apply to). A close second is the difference between tax liability, and refund/balance due on the tax return.
Oh yes, that's another fun one! Your yearly tax return should be as close to 0 as possible, otherwise you're either over- or under-withholding. Then again, I met some people that use it as a kind of piggy bank because they wouldn't be disciplined enough to save up for bigger purchases otherwise and... well, I can't even, but if it works for them, there are worse things to spend money on.
Try convincing a tech person that the shares they get as compensation from their employer are equal to getting money and buying those shares at the time they get them. I also think tech workers tend to over-estimate what "average person" really is because they mostly know "above average people".
And yet here you are trying to spread an agenda in a thread about mouse pointers that taxes are too low because the majority of people are too stupid to understand tax brackets.
