Neither is employable off the bat, and it takes time for someone with zero experience to be valuable.
That makes question who is more employable: a student with 48 months of University, or someone with 6 months of Lambda and 2.5 years of real world experience? Note, I assumed the Lambda grad had a year unemployed.
Yeah, that's it. "Once you begin making at least $50,000 a year, you will owe Lambda 17% of your monthly income until you reach the cap or the terms of your ISA expire."
So if you go from $49,999 to $50,000 you now owe them $50,000 * 0.17, or $8,500.
"Now wait just a minute, FemmeAndroid. If you're just getting a raise at your current job, that won't be covered unless you're a web dev."
Now I don't know about you, but I like doing good work, and I'm a developer at heart, even if I don't have a fancy CS degree or even a Bootcamp diploma. But every desk job I've had has ended up involving development, since I can usually help automate parts of my job. It's worked out well for me, and I'd imagine anyone who comes out of a bootcamp like this without a new job will at least try and leverage their coding experience to improve their current job, get a raise, or get a promotion. Your job might not be 'web developer' but your job will start to involve the skills you learned at Lambda school.
'You will owe payments toward your ISA if your job requires skills you learned at Lambda School, even if your title isn't "Web Developer" or "Data Scientist."'
Heck, even if you start a business, and grow it from the ground up, as soon as you make $50,000 a year, you immediately drop back down $8,500. (They explicitly call out 'Self-employed' as an eligible job on the page linked.) Even if you just get a second job that reasonably only makes a bit of money, you fall into this trap. (They explicitly call out 'Second Job' on the page linked.)
You will be stuck in this catch-22 of not having an incentive to make over $50,000 unless you can make the jump to a little over $60,000 or so for 60 months. That's point 3 on the linked website. "[You are bound by the terms of the ISA until you pay 17% for 24 months, you pay out $30k, or...] You did not make over $4,167/month or did not have a qualifying job, and therefore "deferred" your monthly payments for a total of 60 months."
All the above quotes come from your linked page. I was just simplifying the facts of that very page into a fairly big problem with how it's structured.
Heck, you can even see what I'm talking about by using their own calculator. Go to https://lambdaschool.com/isa-calculator and jump between making $49,500 and $50,000 a year, and you'll see you go from owing nothing to owing nothing a month to $715 a month while only making $4,208. That's a huge leap.
How many people do you hire from other places? I'm never hiring anyone again if I can help it, so I'm not the target either, and this sort of post seems to imply this is a huge loss for Lambda but I'm not sure it is.
In summary, for normal people, taxes in the US come at federal, state and local levels.
1. Federal:
a) Income tax of 10% on income over around $12k (single) or $24k (married) up to 37% on income over $518k (single) to $622k (married). Capital gains tax is at the same rate for assets held less than a year but up to only 20% for assets held more than one year.
b) FICA, a wage tax. You pay for 7.65% for social security and medicare/medicaid on all wages up to around $133k and 0% above that.
2) State. This varies widely. Some states have no income tax, some states have income tax rates of as high as 13.3% (California). Most are around 5%. Each state has different deductions and rules. Capital gains is usually included in this. Most states (but not all) also levy a sales tax of around 4% to 8% on retail transactions.
3) Local. Most local taxes are in the form of property tax on real estate. The rates vary from around 0.5% to 2% of property value. Some towns levy a separate sales tax on top of a state one (if it exists). The real estate and sales taxes are used to fund schools, police, fire, etc. Many municipalities also levy fees for water, trash, etc. Some cities also have an income tax (for example NYC).
To give you an idea of just how complex it is, the US has approximately 11,000 different sales tax jurisdictions. And it's not just a matter of rates. What is taxed and in what context varies. For example, in NYC, food from groceries is not subject to sales tax. But food from restaurants is. Unless, I think the restaurant has no more than some minimum of seats and you orders your food to go. Some sales taxes can also vary by date (i.e. sales tax during summer, but otherwise none). There are also occasional sales tax "holidays" where no sales tax is charged.
Unsurprisingly, tax lawyers and accountants make good money in the USA :-)
San Francisco is not allowed to have a city income tax due to state law. It wouldn’t matter much anyways: it’s a huge commuter town (daytime population is double or more the resident population), so the base to tax is relatively small. The real untapped taxable value in the city is land wealth. Until Prop 13 allows the city to tax land equitably, it will be forced to try harebrained tax schemes on employers or sales.
Small nitpicks: The Medicare / Medicaid portion of FICA is 1.45% and uncapped, and increases by .9% over $200k.
FICA is also paid equally by the employer (.9% ACA add-on excluded), so it’s only an accounting gimmick that prevents it from being a 15% tax on income.
Outside of the cities, this isn't true - Australian speed limits and average driving speed on highways is much lower than basically anywhere in Europe.
Inside cities, Australia definitely does have higher average speeds than inside most European cities though.
This is true of urban areas but not expressways. Motorway limits vary from 120 (Spain) to 140 (Poland) with Germany having sections of unlimited autobahn.
The pie slices represent the spend as a percentage of total spend, and the percentages are of GDP. I'd hope government spending is not 100% of spending!
