I was lurking on Reddit and I saw someone claiming that nowadays governments will do everything to make you out of poverty but moment you went above poverty line, taxes and all of that will make you way worse than what you were initially. I wonder if that is true.
Tons of people still don’t understand taxes are graduated. So… yeah. You’re going to pay more if you have more to pay with. But it never makes your “poorer”. It’s only a higher fraction on each extra dollar, not the money you already paid taxes on at a lower bracket.
There are a few government sponsored benefits that have a cliff aka welfare trap. In those cases, yes you could be worse off if you step off whatever cliff the program has set. But that’s very different from taxes, it’s something to fix, and was generally something that was helpful which is antithetical to a thesis of government suppression.
Back before I met her, my wife was a server and she would never report her overtime hours. No matter how many hours she put in (and it was often 7 days a week) she would never (on paper) exceed 40 hrs/week because she somehow thought it would put her in a higher tax bracket and she would lose money.
The pub she worked at eventually got into other trouble for labor law issues, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners purposely told the servers that just for the free labor.