I wonder how much of this has to do with scale. Americans often look to European countries as models of what governments should do, but I think we often forget that most of those countries have smaller populations than New York City[0]. And, if I can vaguely trust what I'm reading, many of the larger countries have poverty issues that are not unlike those of the U.S.

So, your 40% tax rate is used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues, the government could do a lot more to combat poverty. But, NYC only gets a piece of the pie, and the federal government needs to figure out how to help the homeless in NYC as well as the homeless in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL, and.....

Given that, I tend to think there is not a technocratic solution to poverty in the U.S.--that is, it isn't just that we haven't quite found the proper program, or implemented it properly. Homelessness and poverty have been around for a long time, and while during some periods, some governments may have done alright in dealing with it, no one is ever going to turn a knob and make poverty magically disappear. That's not say we shouldn't try, but we also need plenty of organizations that simply get out there and provide basic help for the homeless (food, shelter, etc).

[0] I'm making a broad generalization, yes.

NYC has an income tax on top of state and federal income taxes. It's based on NYS taxable income. For example, at $65,000/yr you'll pay $2,047 + 3.648% of 5,000, for a total of $2,229.4[0].

0. http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/nyc_tax_rate_sche...

And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...

I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.

I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.

I said "I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes."

The GP might be counting all their payroll deductions as kinda a "tax" depending on how you look at it. It doesn't matter, I just pointed out you didn't include state taxes.

You clearly didn't read the whole article. This particular family inherited $40k but spent it on heroin. The naivety of that Atlantic article is astounding.

I think New York City has done an absolute ton for this family. This girl might have done okay, except her mother encourages her to fight her peers (and the mom picks fights with store clerks in front of her children). That is ultimately going to be her downfall, and I am not sure what the city is supposed to do.

That's a bit of a cheat, though, since "taxable income" is the number you get after accounting for all the politically contrived deductions and exemptions. As a percentage of my total income it's more like 25%, and if I also don't include FICA (since that's just the government holding onto my money for me until I'm old, right?) it goes all the way down to 12%.

That said, 25% is the reality, although it does feel like 40% sometimes.

Dasani's story is sad and it happens far too often. For whatever reason there are plenty of people (like the parents in this article) who will fuck up every chance that you give them.

Being from a crime-ridden, poor city I have to see this every day.

a good start would be to find ways of eliminating "poor taxes" (i.e. the myriad ways in which poor people end up paying more than rich people for the same goods and services), and to replace intrusive criterion-based aid programs with simply giving the poor money (something that studies have proven to be more effective), possibly by way of a negative tax bracket.

For example according to this table Germany spends 27.4% of GDP on welfare (excluding education), while the US only spends 14.8% of GDP.

Maybe the problem isn't the money involved, but the methods involved. After all, they say that to repeat the same actions and expect different results is a form of pathology.