Sometimes, the thought crosses my mind that conservatives care too much about taxes and liberals too little.  But, as college students, we’ll all end up paying our dues to Uncle Sam in the very near future.  So, with the legislative passage of the Bush tax cuts extension, it may be helpful to truly understand how it might really affect us as the future taxpayers of America.  First levied by the US government during the opening years of the Civil War, the federal income tax has presumably been the main point of the contention since the inception of the Tea Party movement, which has rocked the recent political landscape.

It is a progressive tax system in the US— meaning that higher income earning individuals pay more in taxes than do lower income earning individuals.  This stands in contrast to a flat tax (Iceland, Russia, Ukraine) or the more conceptual regressive tax system.  However, the US tax system is a tad more complicated than “the more you make, the more you pay.”

Rather, it’s a marginally progressive tax system, which means that there are brackets that a person’s income falls into and different portions of that income can be taxed at different rates.  For example, an individual tax filer (as opposed to married couples) will pay 10% in taxes for income earned between $0 and about $8,000, 15% for income earned between $8,000 and about $32,500, 25% for income earned between $32,500 and about $79,000 and so on and so forth.  (The 1040 Tax Rate Schedules.)  For some perspective, the median wage earned in America is currently around $42,000.

Anyways, here’s the goodie:  the Washington Post setup an interactive comparison among 1) letting all of the Bush tax cuts expire, 2) Obama’s original tax plan, 3) a plan to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, and 4) the compromise Obama/GOP plan.  The interactive is a bit unwieldy at first, but it’s really informational once you get a handle on how to look at it.