I'm not opposed, but I'm going to just do a real time bare-bones calculation here to see what this bill could end up costing us in terms of the budget.
(Most of the facts are taken from
this page.)
There are about 3,300,000 public school teachers currently working in
the United States Atlasia. Let's forget about this bill's provision for college grads and instead skip to the 10% of teachers in the top teir of the NTLE. The bill would therefore affect a minimum of 330,000 teachers.
The average salary for teachers in the 2010-2011 school year was about $56,000. In Atlasia, this number would put their income tax rate at
22%. Since 50% of this average income would become tax exempt, we're looking at taxes on $28,000. 22% of $28,000 is $6,160. When we multiply that figure by 330,000 for the minimum number of teachers affected by this bill, we can estimate that
the GET Act would result in $2,032,800,000 of lost revenues. The federal government rakes in about $3 trillion in revenues each year, so that loss is almost inconsequential relative to the budget.
(I should note that I have no idea if I did the appropriate calculations for tax exemption. If we're only taxing 50% of the teacher's salary, does that mean we only look at the $26,000 when we're determining their tax rate? If so, the rate would be at 10%, and we'd need to do a few more calculations. Either way, this measure isn't very costly and will probably have my support. Maybe this exercise was a waste of time, but I like to be able to visualize things as best I can.
)
