Word: bracket
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Although the income tax is fair enough in principle?rates rise with ability to pay?the way in which it actually operates is not. Because of elaborate deductions and exemptions, hardly anyone pays the rate that theoretically applies to his salary bracket. The deductions and exemptions excessively favor married couples over single people, homeowners over renters, large families over small, receivers of dividends and stock market profits over people who live by wages alone. Congress narrowed some of the loopholes in 1969, with the result that the number of people who paid no tax whatever on incomes...
...proceedings open with a suitably clever premise-grade-A Alec Guinness, actually. Four respectable citizens, pillars of a Fairfield County country club, have lost their upper-tax-bracket jobs during the present little economic adjustment. They make up the champagne casualties - the affluent walking wounded. Sandy Campbell is an ex-vice president of a mutual fund, shot down with the market. Jack Carmody is an ex-ad-agency ace, gone up in smoke with his TV cigarette accounts. Sam Deitsch is a dress manufacturer who laid it on the hemline for the midi. Harry Price is all the has-beens...
...profits on stocks, real estate or other investments that have been held for six months or more. Previously, as an incentive for private investors to expand the economy, the highest tax on such gains was 25%, a far smaller bite than that on regular income in the upper tax brackets. Under the new law, the tax on capital gains for many high-income people can be as much as 35%; under highly complex rules that add still other taxes, it can go up to 45.5%. At the same time Congress sliced the maximum personal tax on salaries and other "earned...
...will also discourage such extremely risky ventures as investing in wildcat oil drilling and backing Broadway plays. The reason is that in the past, high-bracket investors could write off expenses on such projects from their regular income, yet declare any profits from the sale of the investment at the preferential capital-gains rate of 25%. The narrowing of the difference between those two rates in some cases hardly makes the great risks of failure worthwhile...
...Morins chose to work primarily with men in the 17-to-28 age bracket who have committed misdemeanors. "We make a good team," Bill says proudly; he concentrates on the man while his wife does what she can for the family. He also belies the stereotype of the blue-collar worker as the grousing, Archie Bunkeresque bigot. He grew up in a tough Polish-American enclave in Minneapolis and is proud of the fact that he has worked since he was twelve years old. But he and Jean, who worked at a day-care center for mentally retarded children until...