<story><title>When work doesn&apos;t pay for the middle class</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1005/taxes-financial-aid-college-roughing-up-middle-class.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>I&apos;m not following some of this.  It&apos;s true that the marginal benefits of salary changes for wealthy[1] parents with children in private (US) colleges who also are applying for a mortgage payment reduction on homes they can&apos;t afford is very small.  And for these folks, it may be very tempting to take a part time position[2] instead of working harder.&lt;p&gt;But needless to say, that&apos;s a rather small population.  The article is cherry picking this small population[3] of kinda-sorta-unfortunates (they&apos;re still making $120k a year!) and using it to argue against a bunch of government programs that provide real benefits to people with a fraction of their income.&lt;p&gt;Could things be tuned better?  Yeah.  Benefits programs are filled with this kind of unintended side effect.  But to write this kind of blanket argument cautioning against them seems awfully partisan to me. It&apos;s a fairly typical right-wing Forbes editorial in journalism clothing.&lt;p&gt;[1] $120k per year is in the top 10th percentile or thereabouts -- it&apos;s at the very edge of what most people would consider &quot;middle class&quot;.&lt;p&gt;[2] NOT simply a lower paying one, as the article implies.  A lower paying position is still full time work, after all.  The contention that making less is &quot;bad for the economy&quot; isn&apos;t really sound. Downward wage pressure in high-paying jobs is a good thing for the export economy and a good thing for profits (companies are paying historically high fractions to their most highly compensated employees).&lt;p&gt;[3] That is: gate the income to a small range just big enough to be affected by the loss of financial and mortgage aid, but not so big that it dillutes back to the overall tax rate of ~38%.  Then pick out only the people who actually &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; that tuition &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; mortgage aid: parents with both underwater mortgages &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; privately-school children in the right 4-year age range.  If this isn&apos;t cooking the books, I don&apos;t know what qualifies.</text></comment>
<story><title>When work doesn&apos;t pay for the middle class</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1005/taxes-financial-aid-college-roughing-up-middle-class.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>idm</author><text>Ugh...  Since Forbes can probably make this argument based only on the facts, why did they have to invent a &quot;79% tax rate&quot; for this person?  It&apos;s simply not true.&lt;p&gt;Paying college tuition is not tax, and student financial aid usually does not take the form of a tax rebate.  Therefore, including this in their &quot;79% bogeyman&quot; is inaccurate.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, paying your home mortgage is not a tax, and relief on your mortgages may or may not take the form of a tax rebate.  Again, it is inaccurate to lump this into the so-called 79% tax rate.&lt;p&gt;Forbes made this even worse by applying these expenses to the top 60,000 of the person&apos;s 120,000 income, and calling the entire thing the &quot;marginal tax rate.&quot;&lt;p&gt;By my calculations, we&apos;re talking about a 27.5% marginal tax rate on the top 60k of her income, and then whatever the tax rate would be on her lower 60k of income.  I&apos;m going to estimate the tax rate is something like 20%, which is far less horrifying than 79%.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s still true that income differences will affect financial aid and mortgage payments, so Forbes should point that out, but it&apos;s totally irresponsible to call this a 79% tax rate.</text></comment>