[petercooper]

I always found the US self employment tax curious and wondered if it dissuaded people from being self employed if they had the choice (even setting aside the health insurance situation).

Here in the UK, the self employed pay less (9% vs 12%) in the equivalent tax (called National Insurance here) than the employed, with the tradeoff being that they can't claim various state unemployment benefits (for obvious reasons).

[nathanbarry]

From what I've heard people fear the complexity, not the increased rates. Also it's hard to get health insurance or a mortgage when self-employed.

[griffordson]

It used to be hard to get insurance. That changes in a couple days. It is rude to claim the ACA does anything to help anyone, let alone business owners, but I'm certainly happy that I'll be getting oppressed by Obamacare in the new year.

[nathanbarry]

I had a super easy time getting insurance when I moved to self-employed. But that is something a lot of people are scared of. That is a nice thing about the ACA, you don't have to worry about that.

But I am annoyed my insurance costs are going up by quite a bit, but in the grand scheme of things I still pay very little.

[stirno]

If you setup your company correctly, this is often the case for self-employed people in the US as well.

[petercooper]

Yeah, I was speaking entirely from a self employed perspective, although the semantics get tricky with incorporation. In the UK, though, you can do a similar thing where you incorporate, pay yourself under the level where you have to pay National Insurance (there's a free allowance), and then pay the remainder using dividends (which attract no NI), so you can theoretically reduce your exposure to these types of taxes to nil.