Friday, May 21, 2010

How to cripple the economy

According to this source, this source, and this source, actual post-tax disposable income for many families in Minnesota flattens between income of about $20,000 and $50,000, and in many cases a "raise" from one's employer actually results in less disposable income for the worker. I personally know people who have been told by employees NOT to give them a raise, because it would hurt them financially.

If you want to kill someone's incentive to go to college to get from $20k/year to $40k/year annual income, this would be a great way to do it.

4 comments:

Bike Bubba said...

Pentamom noted:

"Interesting. I wonder if there's a similar effect in PA. My husband's income seems to stay just a little ahead of inflation (excluding last year, which was painful all around), not far above that range, and we seem to get slightly poorer every year -- and I don't think it's all attributable to the increasing size of the mouths we have to feed."

Dunno the precise level of income your family has, but I seem to remember Pentadad is an engineer--and employers have been working hard to keep engineer pay down via H1-B. It also doesn't help that we charge income taxes, but not tariffs--if we wanted to "export jobs," it's great policy.

Not so great for those who work.

pentamom said...

Well, we also live in a low cost of living/low pay area, so it's not the range of the salary that gets me, it's that even though it does seem to stay ahead of inflation, we seem to fall slowly behind in standard of living. That seems to me to be in keeping with your point about MN.

Bike Bubba said...

Not quite, unless your family is welfare queens like mine. (despite excellent income, somehow I got a refund far bigger than what I actually paid in taxes....we'll call it "aid to families of dipstick engineers")

But it's a good point nonetheless...every year, the budget seems to get tighter, and it's not all groceries and piano lessons...

pentamom said...

We're also that kind of welfare queens. With five kids, it's hard to avoid until they start hitting 17 unless you get into pretty princely ranges. In two more years when #3 hits seventeen we'll probably be at the break-even point.