<prompt> Human: What I mean by that is;I hear a lot of people at work whinge about getting a pay rise because theyre taxed more. Or working a certain amount of hours means you lose money over working less, because youll get taxed more.I have discussed this with people and I know that working more doesnt mean I make less, its just trying to explain it to people who look at one pay slip and use that as evidence.  <response>: What country are you talking about?whinge and pay rise are not colloquial in US, so answers from US perspective might not be very helpful.Nonetheless ...In the US you pay more tax as your income goes up, but because of the tax rate never being more than 100, you are not worse off by working more. In US some people have a misconception that when their income reaches a new marginal tax bracket, their entire income is suddenly taxed at their new rate. This misconception, if it were true, would indeed create a saw-tooth look to a graph of take-home as a function of income. I wrote an illustrated post about that two years ago. It shows their fear would be justified if taxation actually behaved as they wrongly think.Graphing one misconception about tax rates Some people in US also get a misimpression that working more is not worth it because the withholding prepayment of tax on bigger than usual paychecks is done in an excessive way, by extrapolating the unusual paycheck as if entire year will have such paychecks. That causes withholding that is far greater than the actual tax that will be due. Any excess withholding gets returned to the taxpayer later when they file, but by that time it is forgotten that this is really reconciling things. What remains is a misguided resentment that the ratio of tax taken from my big paycheckmy big paycheck gross is a big percent, greater than their actual effective tax rate. They whinge that they are being taxed more when they see such a paycheck, though even then they will not be able to rightly say they are taking home less. 