if it were to make you lose certain benefits that is another story. but just based on tax itself, the higher tax brackets are only applied to the money that you earn beyond the threshold amount. for example, if you have 2 brackets, 10% up to 40k and 20% beyond that, and you earn 60k, you would end up paying 4k tax on the initial 40k and then another 4k on the 20k beyond that. there's no scenario in which you would end up earning less due to getting into a higher bracket
Ok, seems your tax system is different than ours (which applies a earnings-dependent percentage to the whole earnings, minus some free amounts which are again often depending on the sum of earnings - yeah, our tax system sucks...).
So it actually was a stupid thing to say.
Damn, you are actually right. Just did a deep dive into Wikipedia and it turns out that I misinterpreted the curves showing the tax percentage depending on the income completely wrong during my whole life. It doesn't show the tax percentage to be applied to your earnings, but you have to integrate over the curve from 0 to your income...
if it were to make you lose certain benefits that is another story. but just based on tax itself, the higher tax brackets are only applied to the money that you earn beyond the threshold amount. for example, if you have 2 brackets, 10% up to 40k and 20% beyond that, and you earn 60k, you would end up paying 4k tax on the initial 40k and then another 4k on the 20k beyond that. there's no scenario in which you would end up earning less due to getting into a higher bracket
Ok, seems your tax system is different than ours (which applies a earnings-dependent percentage to the whole earnings, minus some free amounts which are again often depending on the sum of earnings - yeah, our tax system sucks...).
So it actually was a stupid thing to say.
that's very unusual! based on your instance I thought you lived in Germany, which definitely has a progressive tax system as I just described
Damn, you are actually right. Just did a deep dive into Wikipedia and it turns out that I misinterpreted the curves showing the tax percentage depending on the income completely wrong during my whole life. It doesn't show the tax percentage to be applied to your earnings, but you have to integrate over the curve from 0 to your income...
TIL...