Didnt see one here so I thought I would make one. I see Biden called them out on it during the SOTU address and they didnt like it one bit. Im having lots of fun with this being pro-elimination. Why do you all think?
Well not the companies money, they should keep that. And hey arent they paying you more so you could afford these taxes anyway? All of it should go to the company.
Unless they're going to give me back everything I've paid (with interest), then fuck no. I'm with @Paladin on this:
you prefer paying twice as much for shareholder dividends to be part of the healthcare structure? well, presuming your insurance will cover what ails you in the first place.
There's no better illustration of the death grip that The Predator Class has on government that the whole "OMG the social security trust fund is gonna run out of money!!" bit. Simple: Apply the FICA rate to all forms of regular income (such as what one makes in the stock market, not when you sell your house or have a big night at the casino) and remove the cap. Done. That alone might take in enough money to dramatically expand Medicaid and Medicare (say, include dental and vision) along with more money for SS recipients than they get now by a sound margin. Why don't we? The Oligarchs own the government, at least enough of it to control the outcomes.
This isn't addressed at you Shooter more a general observation, but it's really interesting in situations like this (where money was collected and then spent by a previous generation) that so many small government types suddenly believe in the next generation being on the hook for paying reparations for a situation they had no personal responsibility for creating.
Can you show your work on that? According to https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/ in 2022 FICA taxes brought in $1.42 trillion while income taxes brought in $2.21 trillion. That suggests that that there’s not a ton of room to increase the FICA number on currently untaxed income (as the average tax rate is 24.7% and FICA is 15%) nor that an increase would meaningfully be able to expand programs when Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA marketplace subsidies cost $1.4 trillion alone, while Social Security spent $1.2 trillion. My guesstimate without a deeper breakdown is applying FICA to all regular income gets the government maybe another 20% in FICA income, but not like, enough to actually fund Social Security and the health programs sans trust fund. But maybe you have a different set of numbers that say otherwise, or maybe my rate numbers are off. EDIT: as of 2018 (last year I could find data) there was $170 billion paid in capital gains tax at an average rate of 18%. That’d net $141.67 billion in additional FICA taxes under this plan. That’s a lot, but not a “pay for a Medicare expansion and save the SSTF” lot.
Large proportions of income are untaxed by FICA. These can be much larger than someone making 100k a year at a regular job getting taxed. First off there are people who make above the 160k cap for taxation of FICA. Maybe if math confuses you this is a problem, but let us say you make millions a year, the amount you pay on your income for FICA is miniscule. Large portions of investment income are not taxed, and could be. If everyone paid their taxes, because the rich do not need as much money as poor people, then we would have a surplus in SS and that would be a giant windfall in the economy considering once you live on a fixed income the 95 percent need to spend that money, and spend more over all than the 1 percent as a part of our consumption.
I'm basing my assertion on the supporting claims made about Warren's Wealth Tax in 2019. It's not impossible that a "tax all income" tax would not approach the results of a wealth tax. I'm not an economist. But the intention is to say "there's LOTS of money to do what we need to do, if we have the will to go get it."
he's pushing 90... fucker has already had his turn at the trough. 'sfunny too, in that old age pensions were one of the issues working people fought and sometimes died for in the 1800s. Before that, they just died at work or in poverty. It wasn't really until the 20th century that there was much point in living past 60 if you weren't born into wealth (class mobility hasn't changed much in the past 175 years)
Why is the focus on Rick Scott and Mike Lee? It makes it sound like the super far right Repubs are the only ones who want to gut Social Security and Medicare. That middle of the road cream puff Chris Christie was on record many times as wanting to cut Social Security.
Wealth tax aside (because the actual mechanism makes an enormous difference in terms of receipts, so until the mechanism is clear, I’ll ignore it), I found https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/. The top 10% (income cutoff 153k) is a good proxy for those who would be affected. There’s 6.2 trillion in AGI, but with an average of only 233k in untaxed (FICA) income, for an average of 35k in potential FICA taxes. Multiply by the number of filers, and we get $552 billion. But it’s a fair bet the vast majority of the capital gains tax comes from that segment as well so we can’t the $141 billion above separately. So we end up with $1.96 trillion in FICA taxes compared to $2.6 trillion for SSA, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA subsidies. While that’s still a proxy figure, I think it’s a good one. Even if we do double count the capital gains, that’s still $2.1 trillion vs $2.6 trillion.
And lest I be accused of moving goalposts, ACA marketplace subsidies were only $74 billion in 2021 and CHIP was only $16 billion, so the FICA deficit vs Social Security and Medicare + Medicaid doesn’t meaningfully change, and the point still stands. EDIT: CHIP was 22 billion, not 16, which is just the price of subsidies in CHIP.
As I wrote then, proposals to raise the retirement age are based on the assumption that older workers would continue to work, perhaps until they drop dead, if not for what the CRFB called the “mixed retirement signals that often draw them into early retirement and treat retirement itself as a binary choice.” That implies that workers are almost duped into filing for Social Security, when they would be so much happier staying on the job. These proposals, however, never take into account the differences in life expectancies arising from ethnic, income and educational factors. Put simply, they would disproportionately penalize Black, lower-income and less-educated workers, as well as those whose working lives were spent in physically demanding jobs. These proposals boil down to rich desk-jockeys telling others to just suck it up. Another perennial is to divert Social Security revenues into ostensibly more rewarding investments than the Treasury securities in which the program is legally bound to park its reserves. The trust funds, which hold those reserves, currently amount to more than $2.8 trillion. The latest iteration of this idea is being formulated by a group of senators led by Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Angus King (I-Maine). ------------------- The truth is that elaborate schemes to reach for yield are totally unnecessary, as almost all Social Security experts know. What’s needed to close the gap between current revenues and annual benefit payouts is simply to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax and apply it to investment income. This year, the tax is capped at 12.4% of all wage income up to a maximum of $160,200, with the levy shared equally by employers and employees. Investment income such as capital gains and dividends are entirely exempted. That’s a little-appreciated dodge enjoyed by the 1%, who on average receive about half their annual income from those sources. To see how this works, consider that the maximum payroll tax this year (counting both the employer and employee shares) is $19,864. For someone in the 1% collecting, say, $600,000 in wage income, that tax amounts not to 12.4% of income, but only 3.3%. If that $600,000 was only half the taxpayer’s income, with the rest coming from investments, his or her effective tax rate would be only 1.66%. That points to the most effective means of shoring up Social Security. Removing the wage cap and adding a 6.2% tax on investment income would eliminate the entire projected revenue shortfall, according to the American Academy of Actuaries. Indeed, those changes would provide enough headroom to accommodate a couple of long-overdue improvements, specifically raising the surviving spousal benefit to 75% of the deceased spouse’s benefit from the current 50%, and counting as covered earnings up to five years of childcare, which currently are counted as zero earnings. There’s a reason why such an obvious solution gets short shrift from policymakers: It would hit the patrons of federal lawmakers where they live. It’s much easier to pile the burdens of retirement funding onto middle- and low-income earners. They don’t have the political megaphones of the affluent. What’s most offensive about the reform proposals swirling around in Washington is that they assume that America’s working class can be easily gulled into thinking these solutions will be painless. Raise the retirement age over time — why, everyone is living longer, so what’s wrong with that? Invest Social Security in the stock market? The riches will just flow in. Start cutting benefits now — who would really notice? Let’s not overlook that the promoters of all these proposals promise that they would only affect young workers, not those nearing retirement or already on a pension. Where’s the justice in that? There’s only one rationale for any benefit cuts in Social Security. It’s to build a wall around the wealth of the affluent by making everyone else pay. If you’re a member of the 99%, the “reformers” are coming for you. Hiltzik: Saving Social Security from its 'reformers' - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
