Average Tax Rates for Married Filing Separately: 2009

by Catherine Mulbrandon on March 24, 2010

The fourth in series of infographics I am designing to illustrate the average federal tax rate applied to different salaries. This time I am graphing the average tax rates for someone while married is filing a separate tax return from their spouse.

The difference between this graph and that of a single taxpayer is that the cut offs for 28%, 33% and 35% rates are lower which will increases the average tax rates for people with an income over $78,000.

The income tax graph is created from the 2009 tax schedule for someone married filing separately from their spouse:

which you can find from the IRS Tax Tables here while the information about the social security and medicare tax can be found here.

Tagged as: Area Graph, Average Tax Rate, CIA, IRS, Line Graph, Tax Rates, United States

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  • Tom Heller

    I appreciate your substantial work in putting complex matters into simple(r)-to-understnd graphics, Catherine. Kudos.

    Let me share with you something I’ve recently been noodling on, something I think may lend itself to graphic presentation. Essentially, it ties together the topics of a) income distribution, b) aggregate government spending and c) the distribution of tax burdens, hence revealing the degree of progressive taxation necessary to ‘sustain’ the system.

    Please note I am not defending the ‘system’ or status quo, but instead I am simply suggesting that income and gov’t spending ‘necessitate’ a tax rate (or an array of tax rates, when tax brackets impose differential rates on differing levels of income.)

    OK, here’s what I’ve been noodling: given 1) a distribution of income and 2) an aggregate level of government spending, what ‘shape’ of a schedule of tax rates does this require? Further, how does the shape of those rates translate into the degree of progressivity or regressivity necessary to achieve balance between government spending and the nation’s distribution of income?

    I have not progressed much in devising a model – or even better, a slide-rule type ‘toy’ – that can translate between income distribution, aggregate government spending and a tax schedule shape, but I will share what prompted me to pursue this idea.

    From an older (2005) Statistical Abstract of the U.S., I discerned that aggregate government spending was on the order of $4.7 trillion annually. (Outlays of government at all levels, from all sources.) Wondering what this amount translated into when spread solely across the civilian labor force, I was stunned to learn the aggregate level of government spending equated to about $17 per hour worked by the civilian workforce. What I found most stunning was that this level of spending very closely approximated the *median* hourly wage of the civilian labor force.

    I asked myself how could this be? How could government spending roughly equal the median wage of the nation’s workforce? (Well, progressive taxation and taxing non-wage incomes must help a whole lot!)

    Still, the rough equality of government spending and the workforce’s median wage remains very hard for me to wrap my mind around. If the government is spending $17 an hour (and extracting that amount from the nation’s income distribution via taxes), how steeply progressive must the nation’s tax rate schedule be to enable that half of the civilian workforce earning up to $17 an hour to receive non-negative paychecks (so to speak) at the end of each work week?

    That’s how I began to noodle about graphically depicting the necessary interrelationship between income distribution, government spending and tax rates.

    Integrating these three dimensions graphically would likely prove helpful for people to grasp the significance of issues that lay well beyond simple measures (e.g. Gini) of income inequality, an index that -as I understand it- manages not to include the effect of government spending programs such as transfer payments. Indeed, this sort of integration is absolutely necessary to provide a full understanding of the ‘equality’ of the United States.

    More immediately, however, such an integration could rapidly depict the “social contract” we currently have – and the social contract (and income distribution) needed to sustain future anticipated or potential levels of government spending.

    I’d be interested in learning your thoughts and observations on the challenge of producing something along these lines.

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