The summary completely fails to mention that the "income tax" breakout occurs after Social Security and Medicare taxes are already broken out. Using the 50k income, married w/one child example from the linked calculator, I get $4,085 of total federal tax, of which $3,100 (75.8%) is Social Security, $725 is Medicare/Medicaid (17.7%), and only $260 (6.3%) is income tax. (26.3% of that is national defense, which results in a tax liability of $68.38 or 1.6%, total.)
While the summary is poor, this does bring up an important point. Any discussion of budget cuts that do not affect SS or Medicare is pretty much political theater.
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The summary completely fails to mention that the "income tax" breakout occurs after Social Security and Medicare taxes are already broken out. Using the 50k income, married w/one child example from the linked calculator, I get $4,085 of total federal tax, of which $3,100 (75.8%) is Social Security, $725 is Medicare/Medicaid (17.7%), and only $260 (6.3%) is income tax. (26.3% of that is national defense, which results in a tax liability of $68.38 or 1.6%, total.) While the summary is poor, this does bring up an important point. Any discussion of budget cuts that do not affect SS or Medicare is pretty much political theater.