Women cry foul at Wal-mart

[Roac]

Frankly, I don't see the benefits of 'staying in your tax bracket' until you're making considerably more than $40k / year

To those who think that there is some mystical money-making power to making less money per year to avoid tax brackets - thank you for withdrawing yourselves from the market to make room for the rest of us.

[Paelos]

Funny thing about that argument is its not like you get taxed off the top when you enter a new bracket. The money is just taxed at a different rate in each bracket. If you make 47K and fall into the 27% bracket, you don't just pay 27% on that 47K. You work your way up the brackets.

For the first 10K you pay 5%, for the next 10K you pay 10%, the next 15K may be 20% and then the last 12K would arrive at the 27% rate. So instead of paying a straight 40,000*.27 to get your number, you pay:
(10000*.05)+(10000*.1)+(15000*.2)+(12000*.27). The rates aren't right but the theory is. It's about $5000 worth of difference in taxes between the two examples.

In essence, it doesn't matter how much you make since it's not the totals that are taxes in brackets, its the incremental wealth. It's a common misconception otherwise.

[Baldrake]

There was a cover story on Walmart in the Economist a few weeks ago. (You know, that leftist commie mag.) They were discussing Walmart's distasteful business practices, including pressuring middle management to underreport employees' hours when computing pay. Very interesting read.