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by antirez
5540 days ago
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Thanks for the information, one of the most interesting thing for me is if in most states in US you can deduct taxes if you buy normal things, like a car, a computer, and so forth. In Italy everybody cites the US as example of how taxes should be payed (at least about the general model: everybody pays but less, if you don't pay: huge troubles). One if this dogma about the US system is that you can deduce everything you spend more or less. |
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Relatively few personal purchases are deductible. The most heavily used personal deduction is mortgage interest (interest, not principal). Otherwise most personal deductions are things like tuition, major healthcare expenses, tax paid elsewhere (sales, property), and alimony payments.
And for a majority of Americans, none of these things actually appear on their tax return. Only 41% of American taxpayers file a return listing the deductions above ("itemize"), usually because they carry a mortgage.
The other 59% just take a single deduction ("standard deduction") of about $5800 per adult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deduction).
Finally, if someone found legitimate ways to deduct the things you listed (for example, they were unreimbursed business expenses), they would run into the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). AMT is a floor on the percent of income which must be paid as tax. In calculating AMT, most deductions get ignored (and it ignores one's effective tax rate in other years).