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NARRATIVE EXAMPLE

Tax Comparison for a $100K Earner

A reader question, working through the numbers, and an honest answer.

Captured from platform development conversation

Jason Robertson

v1.1 · Updated May 5, 2026 for v2.9

The Question

For a typical tax payer making $100K annually, how much will that person pay in taxes today in the current system and predicted in the new platform?

The Response

Good question — let me work through this carefully because I want to give you accurate numbers, not just gestures. There's some nuance here because “what someone pays in taxes” depends on what we count (just federal income tax, or also payroll taxes, or also state taxes, or also the platform's pillar contributions). Let me work through the comparison honestly.

The numbers for a $100K earner

Under the current system (2024)

A single filer earning $100,000 currently pays approximately:

Item | Amount
Federal income tax (after $14,612 standard deduction) | $13,841
Social Security tax (6.2%) | $6,200
Medicare tax (1.45%) | $1,450
Health insurance worker premium (avg single coverage) | $1,400
Total federal “tax wedge” | $22,891

That's an effective federal rate of about 22.9%. The worker's employer also pays approximately $14,650 on their behalf (Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) match plus health premium), but that doesn't show up on the worker's pay statement.

Under the platform system (mature operation)

Assuming the worker is in an occupation with a $50,000 wage floor (representative of a mid-career professional):

Item | Amount
Federal income tax (after $25,000 phased-out exemption) | $11,553
Universal Healthcare — employee share (2%) | $2,000
Universal Childcare — employee share (0.5%) | $500
Universal Mental Health — employee share (0.3%) | $300
Universal Healthcare — employer share (4%) | $4,000
Universal Healthcare — combined (6% full economic burden) | $6,000
Universal Childcare — employer share (0.8%) | $800
Universal Childcare — combined (1.3% full economic burden) | $1,300
Universal Mental Health — employer share (0.5%) | $500
Universal Mental Health — combined (0.8% full economic burden) | $800
Health insurance premium | $0 (universal)
Total federal contribution (three values reflect employee/employer/combined per Option E) | Employee-side: $14,353 Employer-side (firm pays): $5,300 Combined: $19,653

That's an effective federal rate of about 16.4%. The worker pays approximately $6,538 less per year — a 28.6% reduction in their total federal cost.

What the comparison shows

The $100K earner saves about $6,538 annually under the platform, but the more important comparison is what each dollar buys:

Under the current system, the $22,891 buys: future Social Security benefits, future Medicare benefits, and current single-person health insurance (often not covering family).

Under the platform, the $16,353 buys: universal healthcare for worker AND family, universal childcare access if they have young children, mental health access without separate cost, retirement balance accumulating in the Sovereign Fund (projected to reach approximately $1.2 million by retirement age for someone starting at age 25), education fund access for self and children, wage floor protection in their occupation, and exposure to all the architecture's compound benefits.

The platform is delivering substantially more for substantially less. This is not magic — it's the result of administrative simplification (the healthcare savings from eliminating the multi-payer private insurance overhead account for most of the gap), pharmaceutical pricing reform, and the Sovereign Fund's investment returns funding what the current system funds through year-by-year payroll taxes.

Total household impact, including non-federal-tax savings

The federal tax wedge comparison above shows what the worker pays through federal channels: $22,891 currently versus $16,353 under the platform, for a federal-channel savings of $6,538. This figure does not capture several other household savings the platform delivers. For the same $100K single filer, the platform also eliminates approximately $900 in annual broadband costs (free universal basic service replaces a typical $75/month subscription), saves approximately $290 in annual tax preparation costs if the worker currently uses paid tax preparation services (Direct File expansion through the Civic Technology pillar), and reduces expected annual identity-theft loss by approximately $85 (federal identity infrastructure reduces fraud exposure for the average household).

Adding these to the federal-channel savings, the total annual household impact for the $100K single filer is approximately $7,800 in reduced costs — an effective increase of about 19% over the federal-only comparison. For a worker who currently does not pay for tax preparation, the figure is closer to $7,500. For a worker who has experienced identity theft, the savings are substantially higher than the average. These figures use the conservative estimates described in the per-household methodology section of the platform's Does This Raise Taxes document; the platform deliberately undersells rather than overstates these benefits.

Public infrastructure benefits not captured here

The dollar figures above account only for benefits that translate cleanly to per-household cash flow. The platform's Civic Infrastructure pillar also commits substantial federal investment to physical and digital systems whose value to citizens is real but does not convert easily to a per-household figure: transportation infrastructure (roughly $80-120 billion annually), water and sewer systems (roughly $40-60 billion), public spaces including libraries (roughly $22-32 billion), and energy grid modernization (roughly $50-80 billion). For the $100K single filer, the value of these investments depends on geography and circumstance: a worker in a region with frequent grid outages benefits more than a worker with reliable service; a worker who uses transit benefits more than a worker who doesn't. The platform commits to the investment but does not estimate per-household savings for these components.

Intangible benefits not captured in the dollar comparison

The dollar figures also do not capture the intangible value that the platform delivers. For the $100K single filer, this includes time recovered (approximately thirty to fifty hours per year currently spent on tax compliance, healthcare administration, and federal-services navigation), reduced anxiety about coverage gaps during job transitions, and the option value of being able to make career decisions without being constrained by employer-provided benefits. The platform does not assign dollar values to these benefits because doing so would either double-count the time savings already implicit in the tax-preparation figure or introduce arbitrary monetization. Some readers will weight these benefits heavily; others will discount them. Both approaches are reasonable. Over a forty-year working life, this $7,800 in annual household savings compounds significantly: nominal cumulative savings reach approximately $312,000 in today's dollars, or about $526,000 in inflation-adjusted nominal dollars (assuming 2.5% annual CPI), with a present value of approximately $213,000 at a 2% real discount rate. The platform's commitments tend to scale with the cost of the services they replace, so the savings grow with general inflation rather than remaining fixed.

Important caveats to this analysis

I want to be honest about several things this calculation doesn't capture:

The transition years would look different. During the build phase (Years 2-5), some platform contributions are running in parallel with existing FICA before old systems sunset. A worker in those years might temporarily pay both, which is one of the implementation challenges the Path to Reality document discusses. The numbers above represent the mature steady-state operation, not the transition period.

The wage floor matters significantly. I used $50,000 as the assumed floor, which is reasonable for a mid-career professional. A worker earning $100K in software engineering (where the floor might be $85K) would see a different exemption. The wage-floor-as-tax-architecture proposal makes the worker's specific occupation matter for their tax calculation, which is part of its appeal but also adds complexity.

State taxes are unchanged. This analysis only addresses federal taxation. State income taxes still apply at whatever rate the worker's state imposes. Some states might choose to mirror the federal approach in their own codes, but that's not part of the platform's core proposal.

The Sovereign Fund accumulation is real but not “spent” in the year. I excluded it from the comparison because it's not really a tax — it's the worker's own retirement account growing. But it's worth understanding that part of the platform contributions flows into individual balances that the worker eventually receives, similar to how Social Security taxes today fund future benefits but with much better personal account growth.

Family situation changes the math. A married couple filing jointly faces different brackets and standard deductions in the current system. A family with three kids gets child tax credits the calculation didn't include. A worker with substantial 401(k) contributions reduces their current taxable income further. The $100K single-filer scenario is representative but not universal.

Behavioral effects could shift things. The platform's design changes incentives in ways that affect actual revenue. Workers who currently optimize aggressively against the standard deduction might optimize differently against the wage floor exemption. The estimates use rough national averages rather than actual distribution modeling.