Get Rich Slowly’s Tax Rate Embarassment
As readers of this blog probably know, Get Rich Slowly is one of the most important and widely read blogs in the personal finance space. Wise Bread ranks it #8. It has more than 81,000 subscribers and a Google PageRank of 5. (That’s good, trust me.)
Early yesterday morning it posted a guest post from CJ at WiseMoneyMatters entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Keep a Mortgage Just for 
the Tax Deduction.” It is not, to say the least, a work of great insight. Filled with breathless explanations of the painfully obvious, it contains such gems as an explanation that a tax deduction reduces your taxable income not the taxes you pay. And it makes some remarkably unfounded generalizations, such as that the reader is unlikely to itemize deductions in the absence of mortgage interest.
But what made the post worth discussing here is something that it lacked, or at least lacked by the time I read it yesterday evening. Apparently, as originally posted the piece contained an “offending section” that betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how income taxes work, specifically the difference between marginal and average tax rates.
PF Blogs, Taxes | Frank Curmudgeon | 
March 11, 2009 11:36 am | 
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