<< 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.
A few years later, that estimate needs to be revised. On Tuesday, The Tax Policy Center, a joint effort by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the number of households that don't pay federal income taxes fell to 45.3 percent. But that figure is still roughly 5 percentage points higher than the center's 2013 estimate of 40.4 percent.