My New York State income tax refund finally arrived on Wednesday. It wasn't as much as I was expecting because it turned out I had made an error (using the wrong tax computation worksheet) in figuring my tax. This was a bit annoying although I can get some (but not all) of the difference back from New Jersey by filing an amended return which I did. Hopefully New Jersey will process this a bit faster than my original return. I was also annoyed to learn that although New York theoretically pays interest on refunds delayed more than 45 days this only applies if the interest is at least $1 so I was out of luck there too.
While looking over the New York tax computation worksheets I noticed something bizarre. Suppose a married couple is taking the standard deduction of $15,000 so that their taxable income (line 38) is $15,000 less than their AGI (line 33). Then if I have figured correctly, if their AGI is exactly $2,000,000 their tax will be $135,972.5 while if their AGI is just $50,000 more (that is $2,050,000) then their tax will be $179,487 or $43,574.50 more. This is a marginal rate of over 87%. Taking federal taxes into account some people in this situation seem to be facing a marginal rate of well over 100% for this income range. This makes no economic sense, it is just evidence that the New York legislature can't be bothered to write sensible tax laws.
Checking in on the new Republican populism
1 hour ago