Noriega: Report says average Utahn pays 1/3 of income to taxes
Apr 16, 2025, 3:17 PM | Updated: 4:38 pm
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SALT LAKE CITY — Today is April 16. The day after Tax Day.
With taxes on the mind, I’d like to introduce you to Bob and Brooke Beehive. The family is fictitious, but the taxes are real. This comes from a report from the Utah Taxpayers Association.
Bob and Brooke both work and make six figures —$96,503 to be exact. They pay $30,918 in taxes. Let that sink in. $96,000 in wages and $31,000 in taxes. That’s a combined 32% tax rate for state, local, and federal.
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Do you want me to blow your mind? You can’t blame Trump or Biden for most of that. Of that $31,000, only $1,612 comes from federal income taxes. That’s right, the remaining $29,306 comes from other taxes.
The biggest chunk comes from Social Security/Medicare taxes. That comes directly out of your paycheck. You pay 7.65% of your salary to Social Security and your employer pays another 7.65% for a —drumroll— grand total of $11,679 or 15.3%. By the way, if you’re self-employed, you pay the entire 15.3%.
Even with that massive tax burden, Social Security is headed for collapse in the next decade. Fixing it will likely require contributions to go up, while benefits go down.
Property tax will cost the Beehives $6,000.
State income tax will take nearly $3,000.
Sales tax, that taps your pocketbook for nearly $250 extra per month on purchases.
We can bemoan the fact that we’re handing over one out of three dollars we earn to the government, but which programs are we cutting?
To scale back the gas tax, are we going to put up with more potholes and fading lanes on the freeway?
To cut down the state income tax, are we going to tolerate spending cuts to education?
If we cut down on our Social Security contributions, are we ready for the fund to go insolvent in five years instead of 10?
This report is one of the best reminders I’ve ever seen that our yeses have consequences and those consequences are taxes.
Every time we vote yes to build a library, recreation center or school— those property taxes go up. Perhaps it’s only $10-$15 this year for that project, but string together a few decades of yeses and we get to chop off that dollar bill by a third.
I wonder if we’ve ever considered a new strategy, stringing together a decade or two of noes just to see how far our dollar can stretch and what we can and can’t live without.
Dave Noriega is the co-host of Dave & Dujanovic on KSL NewsRadio. Follow him on Facebook and X.
