I worked on a farm, a potato and dairy farm family cooperative in central Maine for a few years before I went to college. I am glad someone grows potatoes and makes milk but I also learned that the risk and rewards were not competitive with the other opportunities I chose to pursue.
Regarding the paying $18,000 in taxes on $67,000 of income (26%). I assume that in that $18,000 is your contributions to Medicare and Social Security (self-employment taxes). The self-employment tax today is over 15% all by itself so that would mean your effective income tax rate was around 11% or 12%.
I was actually self-employed for a while and so at that time the combination of my income tax and my self-employment tax was over 35% of my income. I was also paying over $800 a month for health insurance. When I went from being contract labor to being a direct employee my employer cut my pay by about $30,000 a year to offset the cost of their share of Social Security and Medicare, workers comp, unemployment insurance and medical insurance. I still had to pay my half of Social Security and Medicare, more than $10,000.
You should not imagine that I am complaining. I don’t mind pay these taxes and I wrote this as a dispassionate analytical comparison for edification of the readers.
Your story lead me to look up the farm where I once worked and am glad to see they are still going though I don’t see much about potatoes anymore.
A little more digging and I found the potatoes side of the business.
TEK
