<< Back to glossary. UCS-2 is a character encoding standard in which characters are represented by a fixed-length 16 bits (2 bytes). It is used as a fallback on many GSM networks when a message cannot be encoded using GSM-7 or when a language requires more than 128 characters to be rendered.
Quick Answer. Most U.S. taxpayers with a traditional salary pay 6.2 percent of each paycheck as taxes for social security and 1.45 percent for Medicare, according to the California Tax Service Station. Additional amounts may be deducted from each paycheck for federal withholding or for state fees such as unemployment insurance.
For most Americans, the Medicare portion of the FICA tax remains at 2.9 percent, of which half (1.45 percent) is paid by employees and half by employers. Unlike Social Security, there is no limit on the amount of earnings (which includes salary and bonus income) subject to the Medicare portion of the tax.