David Schleis- Tax Rates
Understanding the Many Different Tax Rates Each Year
David Schleis, and his fellow Tax Preparers at DS Financial Advisors, are waiting to explain the current and past tax rates to you. These rates, which are applicable to every tax payer, can be confusing for some. Seeking the help of a qualified accountant and finding a tax professional who is knowledgeable is the key to prompt and efficient income tax return filing.
What are Tax Rates?
The federal government and the Internal Revenue Service dictates that each dollar of certain income you earn is subject to taxation. The percentage taxed on that dollar is determined by your individual tax rate. Tax rates are different for everyone, and will change yearly, depending upon your total annual income and filing status. For tax payers who are unsure of their unique tax liability, it is important to find a tax professional for tax rates.
Tax Brackets Explained
There is much confusion between the terms tax rate and tax bracket. Many believe that they are interchangeable, though they are not. Your tax bracket is determined based upon a formulaic spreadsheet that uses your filing status and total annual income. When this information is added to the tax bracket system, the resulting number is the tax rate that some or all of your income will be taxed at. Using the tax bracket guidelines, you can figure out your own individual tax rate. Keep in mind that the tax rates change each year. If you are filing
The checks and balances system provides equal rights and power to various different levels of governments. With that, this ultimately “balances” out all the rights and justices for each of the branches to prevent any dictatorship. The Federal Government consists of three branches; the Executive (President), the Legislative (Congress), and the Judicial (Supreme Court) branch. The Executive has the power to assign new judges that are later checked by the Senate (Congress). The Executive can veto any laws the Legislative creates. However, if 2/3 of the majority disagrees with the President’s denial, the Legislative branch is capable of overriding it. The Legislative checks and clarifies every treaty and fund the Executive proposes. The
Both the width (or range) of the tax brackets (the amount of income taxed at a particular rate) in the tax rate schedules and the range of the tax rates in the tax rate schedules (the difference between the lowest tax rate and the highest tax rate) vary by filing status.
A tax bracket is a range of taxable income that is taxed at a specified tax rate. Because only the income in the particular range is taxed at the specified rate, tax brackets are often referred to as marginal tax brackets or marginal tax rates. The level and width of the brackets depend on the taxpayer’s filing status. The tax rate schedules include seven tax rate brackets. The rates for these brackets are 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, and 39.6%. In general, the tax brackets are widest for
For example, if the tax rate is seven percent and one person makes one thousand dollars they would pay seventy dollars to the government. While someone that only made one hundred dollars would pay seven dollars to the government; this they may deem unfair.
There are two basic forms of taxation within the United States: progressive, where the effective tax rate increases as wealth or income increases, and regressive in which the effective tax rate goes up as wealth or income decreases.
Federal tax rates on corporate taxable income vary from 15% to 35%. State and local taxes and rules vary by jurisdiction, though many are based on Federal concepts and definitions. Taxable income may differ from book income both as to timing of income and tax deductions and as to what is taxable. Corporations are also subject to a Federal Alternative Minimum Tax and alternative state taxes. Like individuals, corporations must file tax returns every year. They must make quarterly estimated tax payments. Controlled groups of corporations may file a consolidated return. Partnerships have flow-through taxation which means that the entity does not pay taxes on its income. Instead, the owners of the entity pay tax on their "distributive share" of the entity's taxable income, even if no funds are distributed by the partnership to the owners. Estates and nongrantor trusts must file income tax returns just as individuals do, but with some important differences. For one, their income is taxed at either the entity or beneficiary level depending on whether it is allocated to principal or allocated to distributable income, and whether it is distributed to the beneficiaries. And because their exemption amounts, tax brackets and related thresholds haven’t been indexed for inflation or modified for tax relief to the extent those for individuals have, they can be
The current income tax system is inherently complex. The guide provided to citizens to fill out their 1040 taxes has 288 pages of instructions. (IRS, 2014) The US tax code is too complicated. What is the average American to do? The answer is that most Americans turn to outside preparers or tax preparation software to figure
If taxes are proportional, the tax rate remains constant for any income level, whereas taxes that are progressive, its tax rate gets higher as the income level increases.
Are we as American citizens receiving what we expect from our government or are we demanding too much from it. It seems that over the last several years we have demanded that our government has to find ways of doing more with less. As a result of the ever-increasing demands our government is forced to face, according to Professor Paul C. Light, the American government is ill executed and the federal service is less energetic than ever before (Paul, 2008). Thus, it seems that we as Americans are not getting what we expect from our government. It is overworked; load with bureaucratic problems, forcing federal service workers to more with less. However problematic our government is, through out its history, it has created many different
The Internal Revenue Service provides five different tax filing statuses to choose from when filing individual tax returns:
to distort the original intent Congress had when Section 7704 was added to the Internal Revenue Code.
The tax code is a document from the federal government, which can be thousands of pages long. In this federal document, there are rules that any and all individuals and businesses must follow regarding what percentage of their money and more specifically they should pay to the federal government as tax. In the year 1913 when the United States imposed income taxes on a permanent basis, the U.S. income tax code started with only 400 pages. However, as years went by and new rules were added to the system, the tax code eventually reached over 75,000 pages as of 2014.
The information that I am currently learning right now in my tax class will help greatly as I
The Federal Government relies predominately on the individual income tax, and federal income tax makes up more than 50 percent of the federal government’s revenue. Income taxes are paid by all those who earn income (Mikesell, 2011). It is essentially a bill from the federal and state governments for individual earnings through salaries and investment profits. Income tax is considered a progressive tax because the individual's financial obligation rises with the level of reportable income (Mikesell, 2011). Although income tax is the one of the most effective ways of raising revenue for the government, it is also one of the most controversial.
Taxation systems are usually modeled in such a way that they take into consideration the social welfare of the citizens. The government and other policy makers have the responsibility of ensuring that the system takes into account the needs of the citizens. The bottom line is that taxation should foster equal distribution of resources. The rate of taxation is usually arrived at after several considerations have been made. The rates are not fixed as they depend on the various economic changes. The issue of how taxation should be distributed among the different economic classes is yet to be addressed.