Disposable income

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Median American household disposable income
Not including sales tax or property tax Household spending United States.png
Median American household disposable income
Not including sales tax or property tax
Denmark disposable income after tax
Not including value-added tax or property tax Denmark disposable income.webp
Denmark disposable income after tax
Not including value-added tax or property tax
Germany disposable income after taxes
Not including value-added tax or property tax Germany disposable income after taxes.webp
Germany disposable income after taxes
Not including value-added tax or property tax

Disposable income is total personal income minus current taxes on income. [1] In national accounting, personal income minus personal current taxes equals disposable personal income or household disposable income. [2] Subtracting personal outlays (which includes the major category of personal [or private] consumption expenditure) yields personal (or, private) savings, hence the income left after paying away all the taxes is referred to as disposable income.

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Restated, consumption expenditure plus savings equals disposable income [3] after accounting for transfers such as payments to children in school or elderly parents' living and care arrangements. [4]

The marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is the fraction of a change in disposable income that is consumed. For example, if disposable income rises by $100, and $65 of that $100 is consumed, the MPC is 65%. Restated, the marginal propensity to save is 35%.

For the purposes of calculating the amount of income subject to garnishments, United States' federal law defines disposable income as an individual's compensation (including salary, overtime, bonuses, commission, and paid leave) after the deduction of health insurance premiums and any amounts required to be deducted by law. Amounts required to be deducted by law include federal, state, and local taxes, state unemployment and disability taxes, social security taxes, and other garnishments or levies, but does not include such deductions as voluntary retirement contributions and transportation deductions. Those deductions would be made only after calculating the amount of the garnishment or levy. [5] The definition of disposable income varies for the purpose of state and local garnishments and levies.

Meanings of disposable income

Disposable income can be understood as:

Discretionary income

Discretionary income is disposable income (after-tax income), minus all payments that are necessary to meet current bills. It is total personal income after subtracting taxes and minimal survival expenses (such as food, medicine, rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, transportation, property maintenance, child support, etc.) to maintain a certain standard of living. [7] It is the amount of an individual's income available for spending after the essentials have been taken care of:

Discretionary income = gross income – taxes – all compelled payments (bills)

The term "disposable income" is often incorrectly used to denote discretionary income. For example, people commonly refer to disposable income as the amount of "play money" left to spend or save. The Consumer Leverage Ratio is the expression of the ratio of total household debt to disposable income.[ citation needed ]

In the national accounts

The system of national accounts defined the concept of disposable income for all institutional sectors of the economy. For corporations it is equal to profit retained, and for the government it is equal to taxes + income received from public corporation. The sum of disposable income across all institutional sectors is called the national disposable income. [8] [ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saving</span> Income which is not immediately spent or otherwise used for consumption

Saving is income not spent, or deferred consumption. In economics, a broader definition is any income not used for immediate consumption. Saving also involves reducing expenditures, such as recurring costs.

In economics, the fiscal multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from a change in government spending. More generally, the exogenous spending multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from any autonomous change in spending. When this multiplier exceeds one, the enhanced effect on national income may be called the multiplier effect. The mechanism that can give rise to a multiplier effect is that an initial incremental amount of spending can lead to increased income and hence increased consumption spending, increasing income further and hence further increasing consumption, etc., resulting in an overall increase in national income greater than the initial incremental amount of spending. In other words, an initial change in aggregate demand may cause a change in aggregate output that is a multiple of the initial change.

Capital gain is an economic concept defined as the profit earned on the sale of an asset which has increased in value over the holding period. An asset may include tangible property, a car, a business, or intangible property such as shares.

In economics, the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is a metric that quantifies induced consumption, the concept that the increase in personal consumer spending (consumption) occurs with an increase in disposable income. The proportion of disposable income which individuals spend on consumption is known as propensity to consume. MPC is the proportion of additional income that an individual consumes. For example, if a household earns one extra dollar of disposable income, and the marginal propensity to consume is 0.65, then of that dollar, the household will spend 65 cents and save 35 cents. Obviously, the household cannot spend more than the extra dollar. If the extra money accessed by the individual gives more economic confidence, then the MPC of the individual may well exceed 1, as they may borrow or utilise savings.

Garnishment is a legal process for collecting a monetary judgment on behalf of a plaintiff from a defendant. Garnishment allows the plaintiff to take the money or property of the debtor from the person or institution that holds that property. A similar legal mechanism called execution allows the seizure of money or property held directly by the debtor.

In economics, a country's national saving is the sum of private and public saving. It equals a nation's income minus consumption and the government spending.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gross national income</span> Total domestic and foreign economic output claimed by residents of a country

The gross national income (GNI), previously known as gross national product (GNP), is the total amount of factor incomes earned by the residents of a country. it is equal to gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes received from non-resident by residents, minus factor income paid by residents to non-resident.

A traditional IRA is an individual retirement arrangement (IRA), established in the United States by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). Normal IRAs also existed before ERISA.

Autonomous consumption is the consumption expenditure that occurs when income levels are zero. Such consumption is considered autonomous of income only when expenditure on these consumables does not vary with changes in income; generally, it may be required to fund necessities and debt obligations. If income levels are actually zero, this consumption counts as dissaving, because it is financed by borrowing or using up savings. Autonomous consumption contrasts with induced consumption, in that it does not systematically fluctuate with income, whereas induced consumption does. The two are related, for all households, through the consumption function:

Average propensity to consume (APC) is a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes to analyze the consumption function, which is a formula where total consumption expenditures (C) of a household consist of autonomous consumption (Ca) and income (Y) multiplied by marginal propensity to consume. According to Keynes, the individual's real income determines saving and consumption decisions.

The European Union withholding tax is the common name for a withholding tax which is deducted from interest earned by European Union residents on their investments made in another member state, by the state in which the investment is held. The European Union itself has only limited taxation powers, so the name may be considered a misnomer. The aim of the tax is to ensure that citizens of one member state do not evade taxation by depositing funds outside the jurisdiction of residence and so distort the single market. The tax is withheld at source and passed on to the EU Country of residence. All but three member states disclose the recipient of the interest concerned. Most EU states already apply a withholding tax to savings and investment income earned by their nationals on deposits and investments in their own states. The Directive seeks to bring inter-state income into the same arrangement, under the Single Market policy.

Taxation in the Netherlands is defined by the income tax, the wage withholding tax, the value added tax and the corporate tax.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Average propensity to save</span> Proportion of income which is saved

In Keynesian economics, the average propensity to save (APS), also known as the savings ratio, is the proportion of income which is saved, usually expressed for household savings as a fraction of total household disposable income (taxed income).

Household income is a measure of income received by the household sector. It includes every form of cash income, e.g., salaries and wages, retirement income, investment income and cash transfers from the government. It may include near-cash government transfers like food stamps, and it may be adjusted to include social transfers in-kind, such as the value of publicly provided health care and education.

The Fair Tax Act is a bill in the United States Congress for changing tax laws to replace the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and all federal income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, gift taxes, and estate taxes with a national retail sales tax, to be levied once at the point of purchase on all new goods and services. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to households of citizens and legal resident aliens as an advance rebate of tax on purchases up to the poverty level. The impact of the FairTax on the distribution of the tax burden is a point of dispute. The plan's supporters argue that it would decrease tax burdens, broaden the tax base, be progressive, increase purchasing power, and tax wealth, while opponents argue that a national sales tax would be inherently regressive and would decrease tax burdens paid by high-income individuals.

In the United States tax law, an above-the-line deduction is a deduction that the Internal Revenue Service allows a taxpayer to subtract from his or her gross income in arriving at "adjusted gross income" for the taxable year. These deductions are set forth in Internal Revenue Code Section 62. A taxpayer's gross income minus his or her above-the-line deductions is equal to the adjusted gross income. Because these deductions are taken before adjusted gross income is calculated, they are designated "above-the-line". Thus, those deductions allowed in computing "taxable income" under section 63 of the IRC are "below-the-line deductions". Above-the-line deductions may be more valuable to high-income taxpayers than below-the-line deductions. Since tax year 2018, above-the-line deductions are reported on Schedule 1 of IRS Form 1040.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taxation in Spain</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Kingdom National Accounts – The Blue Book</span>

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In Slovakia, taxes are levied by the state and local governments. Tax revenue stood at 19.3% of the country's gross domestic product in 2021. The tax-to-GDP ratio in Slovakia deviates from OECD average of 34.0% by 0.8 percent and in 2022 was 34.8% which ranks Slovakia 19th in the tax-to-GDP ratio comparison among the OECD countries. The most important revenue sources for the state government are income tax, social security, value-added tax and corporate tax.

References

  1. "Income Data Quality Issues in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-10-14. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  2. Ruser, John; Pilot, Adrienne; Nelson, Charles. "Alternative Measures of Household Income: BEA Personal Income, CPS Money Income, and Beyond" (PDF). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-06-11. Retrieved 2013-08-23.
  3. https://portal.wsiz.rzeszow.pl/plik.aspx?id=12166 [ dead link ]
  4. "Research Publications". www.parl.gc.ca. Archived from the original on 21 August 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  5. "31 CFR 285.11". Legal Information Institute. Cornell University. Retrieved June 29, 2012.
  6. "Glossary:National disposable income". Eurostat . Retrieved 2021-05-03.
  7. Linden, Fabian (1998). "A Marketer's Guide to Discretionary Income (abstract)". US Department of Education. Retrieved 2007-12-27.
  8. "Glossary:National disposable income". ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2024-11-12.