The biggest part of that is social insurance. It’s called a tax (FICA) in America to make people hate it.

And here’s the fun part: there’s an annual cap which is about the same as a construction worker’s salary. Once the cap app is reached they stop deducting it. So high earners only pay it for the first few pay periods of the year.

I remember the first time I earned more than the cap. I thought somebody had made a mistake when my take-home pay went up mysteriously in the middle of the year. So imagine: Bezos and friends are all done paying FICA in the first ten or fifteen minutes of the year.

When your first child starts walking and destroying things.

Idiocracy (2006)

Totally tangential, but does anybody else feel old when people use them simple past of “to run” as it’s past participle?

It was still irregular even in American English when I last lived there.