Social Security is not broken. Also SS is not a retirement plan, it's insurance against poverty either in old age or if you become incapacitated when your young enough to work. I can't confirm this, but I've heard as much as 30% of current recipient are young enough to work, but can't.
Social Security is not broken
Also SS is not a retirement plan, it's insurance against poverty either in old age
I would say, off the top of my head:
1. that money has already been taxed, and
2. because the more you tax something, the more you discourage it. Some activities are more vulnerable to this than others. Labor (especially low and middle income) is very inelastic - they need that money. Capitol? Capitol can move pretty quickly and fairly easily. Cut that golden goose up too much, and you'll find the golden egg you're pulling out is your last.
Also SS is not a retirement plan, it's insurance against poverty either in old age
wiki said:A 1954 amendment to the Social Security Act stripped old-age benefits from contributors who were deported under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The following year Ephram Nestor, an alien from Bulgaria who had paid into Social Security for 19 years, began drawing benefits. Nestor was subsequently deported for involvement in the Communist Party, and his benefits were terminated. He sued the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on the basis that the amendment had deprived him of a property interest in Social Security without due process and was therefore invalid.
Opinion of the Court
The Court ruled that there is no contractual right to receive Social Security payments. Payments due under Social Security are not “property” rights and are not protected by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The interest of a beneficiary of Social Security is protected only by the Due Process Clause.
Under Due Process Clause analysis, government action is valid unless it is patently arbitrary and utterly lacking in rational justification. This provision of §202 is not irrational; it could have been justified by the desire to increase the purchasing power of those living in America, because those living abroad would not spend their payments here.
1 Money that is earned as capital gains has not been taxed already. That's false.
2 Good point. Taxing something does discourage it.Therefore, if we want to discourage people from earning money, as opposed to depending on the government for necessities, we should tax incomes at a higher rate than we do capital gains.
Was that your point?
This is completely false. Social Security is a welfare program funded by a payroll tax. End of story.
With an insurance policy you have a contract stipulating how much you will pay in and how much you'll get out of it based on certain contingencies.
With Social Security there is no contract, and thus no guarantee. The amount you pay in or your eligibility to collect benefits can be changed by congress at any time. The amount of those benefits can also be changed at any time by congress. But don't take my word for it, the issue was settled 60 years ago by the US supreme court in Fleming v. Nestor:
Social Security is not insurance, it's welfare.
Trump got rid of corporate taxes? That's amazing - I would have thought it would have been a bigger news story...
... Okay . That was a little goofy, but, the point remains. I would be MUCH more open to a compromise position that ACTUALLY taxed that income equally... Which would mean either getting rid of corporate taxes and taxing capital gains as regular income (my preferred option between the two*) or making sure that the combined rate between them did not exceed that of income rates (which strikes me as needlessly complicated).
* Worth noting; this would strongly incentivize reinvestment of profits within the company, reorienting our economy at least somewhat to long term ( v our current obsession with quarterly) growth.
..... I think you are drawing a connection I did not. Investment doesn't produce dependence on Government benefits; low or lack of income generally does. So, while I would agree wholeheartedly that high tax rates on income can reduce income (potentially increasing dependence), I don't think that is likely to impact investment as much.
The point I was making is that different activities have differing levels of responsiveness to marginal changes. So the relative loss of investment activity that works come from (say) an increase in capital gains rates by 10% would be greater than the relative loss of income activity you would see from a 10% increase on work-based income, especially at the low-middle and middle income levels. The very low and high incomes may be slightly more elastic, but, probably still a good bit less so than capital.
That's not factually correct, it's a myth.
It is not true that congress has removed any money from Social Security. What HAS happened is that SS is required to invest it's trust fund into Treasury bonds, which is the safest investment in the world, and this has been the case ever since SS was started. the US treasury has never defaulted on it's bond obligations, and never will and never will have to. The government issues money and also has the power to tax and issue bonds, so there is no reason that a country that issues it's own money would ever need to default on an obligation which is denominated in it's own currency.
I would say, off the top of my head:
1. that money has already been taxed, and
2. because the more you tax something, the more you discourage it. Some activities are more vulnerable to this than others. Labor (especially low and middle income) is very inelastic - they need that money. Capitol? Capitol can move pretty quickly and fairly easily. Cut that golden goose up too much, and you'll find the golden egg you're pulling out is your last.
Capital gains and corporate taxes were much higher in the 90s than they are now and we certainly were not hurting for business or market investments then. My point is that you can get into trouble with blanket rules on things. Sure, if corporate and capital gains taxes were high enough, they would hurt business and market investments, but the key there is "high enough". With capital gains taxes in particular, there is no evidence that a return to 90s era rates would hurt investment, indeed we had irrational exuberance in regards to investment back then.
If you tax me at 60%, I probably won't work as hard. But just because my taxes are 25% and you cut them to 20% does not mean I work harder.
That said, corporate taxes were in need of reform (and still in need of reform), to get the statutory rates (which were high) closer to the effective rates (which were not that high), because such a difference between statutory and effective rates creates distortions.
Taxing some activity discourages that activity. Taxing income discourages people from working harder for more income. That's where we agree, I think.
We also agree on corporate taxes. A well run corporation will spend most of its income on salaries of employees, on capital improvements, and on paying dividends to share holders. There should be little left to tax anyway. So, sure, let's eliminate taxes on corporations and instead tax those dividends, salaries, and increases in value at the same rate. Income is income, regardless of source.
And, if corporations aren't paying taxes, they aren't people, and therefore have no right to exercise free "speech" by contributing to political campaigns. The people who are shareholders in those corporations are people, are paying taxes, and have a right to contribute all the "speech" dollars they want.
The old canard about social security being "robbed" is basically an ignorance test. What the hell else would they rather the government do with social security?
I think you are describing a cumulative marginal effect as though it were a binary one. There isn't a percentage where "okay, now we will see less of the activity than we would otherwise", there is only a sliding scale of increasingly less of the activity relative to what would otherwise occur, with a tipping point at which we see even less revenue from it due to the increased amount of reduced occurrence. There is no "the key is high enough", unless you are speaking to revenue and that tipping point - if you are simply discussing reduced activity, that is already occurring.
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Well, I did start this whole thread on one particular idea.... [emoji14]
Here is my proposal:
Allow workers to opt into a partially privatized system, where of their 7.65% FICA expenditures, 5% goes into a private TSP-style account; and the Employers match follow the same. the remaining 2.65% (or, when you count the match, 5.3%) will go straight into SS, but it will be revenue for which SS will never see a liability. the cost for opting out is that part of your pay continues to go to pay for others, but the upside is that you get a combined total of 10% of your annual income going into a retirement account that belongs to you, and grows tax-free. Social Securities' revenues will instantly drop, but nowhere near as severely as their liabilities. To ensure solvency in the adjustment period (and to make it politically palatable); lift the cap. We can lift the cap on only the worker (and not the employer) if we want to encourage job-creation; or lift it on both if we need the revenue to ensure solvency, or if that's the only way to get the thing passed; here is room for compromise wiggling. Higher paid workers will see more of their money leave in the form of taxes, but those making less than $604,000 will get back even more in the form of ownership of personalized accounts (assuming the employer cap isn't lifted, and that's not figuring for the added benefit of those accounts growing tax-free), and so they will be willing to make the trade. Perhaps another compromise point would be to raise the cap to $604K. Poorer workers can either spend their lifetime building far more wealth than they ever would have seen under Social Security if they are younger, or keep the guaranteed program benefits if they are older.
ta-da! the American people and the Government are left better off.
how much better off?
welllll, let's do a quick example:
Joe graduates High School and goes to work, making 25,000 a year. Not anyone's idea of incredible pay, but there you are. Joe gets' a 2% raise every year to account for his increasing talent, experience, etc. The 10% of his income goes into a mix of funds that matches the S&P 500 Combined Annualized Growth average since 1982: 7.98% (after you account for inflation). If Joe retires nice and early at 62; his retirement fund will be worth $1,030,110, and if placed into an annuity / conservative account that generates a 5% annual return, his monthly benefit will be $4,292. That would be slightly less than his last monthly paycheck of $4,979; but still quite livable. If Joe works until he's 65, his monthly benefit will climb above his monthly income to $5,473; and if he decides (as most of us probably will) to delay retirement to 68, he's looking at a monthly retirement check of $6,966.
1 Dividends, salaries, and increases in value when realized by sale, and I can agree to this compromise. Taxing mere increases in value would cause this to cease to be an income tax, and become a national property tax instead which, IIRC, would be unConstitutional.
2 Corporations are groups of people acting together, so, what you are saying here is "People lose their freedom of speech when they act in groups". So, for example, Unions wouldn't have the right to argue for better treatment of workers, Greenpeace wouldn't have the right to advocate for protecting the environment, the Democrat Party wouldn't have the right to advocate for its platform, and Random House wouldn't have the right to publish books if the government didn't like it.
So... I'm going to have to hard disagree with you, there. Citizens do not lose their rights merely because they act in concert with each other.
3 It is also worth noting, of course, that if you take away legal personhood from a corporation, that means they can no longer be sued.
This all sounds nice but there is a huge problem. What about the existing social security retirees? You can't just eliminate their benefits when they have been paying into social security for decades.
And what about the people over the age of 50, who are getting close to getting social security?
since, the younger workers are still paying social security, then it wouldn't be fair to eliminate their social security benefits
So to introduce a private retirement system, people will have to pay the existing social security tax for existing retirees, and the new retirement tax/fee for future ones, which is double the tax.
Here is how we replace social security with a private system. First, we don't raise the social security tax for any reason, and will have to trim benefits to keep the program afloat.
Next, we increase the social security benefits a tiny bit below inflation, so that in real dollars it will decline very gradually.
At the same time, we increase employer 401K matching requirements. This will encourage more savings by employees and require that employers do their part.
I'd also have employer 401K go directly into employee IRAs so we don't have have to keep track of a half dozen 401Ks from past employers.
We should also move to completely eliminate pensions from the public sector.
We could also consider measures to encourage children and family members to care for elderly parents and grandparents.
1 Of course. You don't pay capital gains taxes until the property is sold and the gains are realized.
2 If the people as a group don't pay taxes, then they don't have a right to engage in politics It's that simple.
The individuals who own the corporation still have the right of free speech like anyone else, of course.
Plus, the corporation has the right to promote their products. That's free speech. They make commercials and broadcast them, that's OK. But political opinions? No, not unless they pay taxes and support the government. They have no dog in the hunt.
3. Oh, I think a group of people can be sued. You don't have to sue an individual necessarily.
The amount of business investment and market investment is pretty inelastic relative to tax rates until they hit such a level that those rates are so confiscatory that such investments are no longer worthwhile. For example, whether a company invests in a new datacenter or not is dictated by their need to do so based upon business requirements. Cutting their taxes won't result in them building out a bigger datacenter than they would have otherwise unless taxes were so high that they hindered the company's ability to do so.
The biggest problem we have in this country in the last 25 years or so has not been tax rates, whether they were high or low, but rather all the rent seeking behavior at all levels of our business culture. A typical engineering or IT division of a company these days will have far more consultants, product managers, product management managers, marketing people and so on than they will have engineers or software engineers. It's why productivity growth has been so anemic for the last 25 years. Much of our private sector is so full of rent seeking behavior that it runs more like a pyramid scheme than anything else. That is a topic for another thread though.
:thumbs:
Firstly, your assumption is wrong - if these people are paying capital gains taxes on the money they make with their business, then they as a group are absolutely paying taxes.
Secondly, I find this notion fascinating. So non-profit corporations who don't pay taxes because they are non-profit corporations shouldn't be allowed to exercise freedom of speech. You wish to get rid of (for example) newspapers who editorialize, magazines with editorials, environmental groups who advocate for a better environment and, in fact, all political advocacy groups, effectively most venues by which U.S. citizens actually exercise their first amendment rights to band together and petition the government....
...and you think this will be increasing our freedom?
no thanks. I'd rather not live in a country where politicians get to ban books, movies, magazines, or newspapers they find inconvenient.
Naturally. They are simply barred from effective means of exercising it. Sort of like having the right to vote as a black person in the south during Jim Crow.
1. Corporations being an entity made up of people who are paying taxes, this assumption is incorrect. That was at the heart of my earlier point to you that profits from investments are taxed twice.
2. Please point to the portion of the Constitution or any documentation demonstrating the Founders' intent that one's inalienable rights depended for their existence on having a positive net tax rate to the federal government. Prior to the individual federal income tax, did no individual in this country have rights? When it was imposed at first only on the rich - did only they have rights, and everyone else did not?
No, you actually need someone to sue.
What does a country full of old people do to solve ther SSI problems, they go bankrupt or figure out a way to reduce the old population.
Lets fix SSI and Medicare by promoting Euthanasia. we are spending entirely to much on healthcare the last year of our lives. We as a society need to understand that our innate greed for life is draining resources from our society in general. Most other nations accept death so much better than the US. We spend amazing amounts of money always trying to retain that youthful appearance. Let's welcome odl age, let's cherish it and let's accept the end of our lives more gracefully than being bedridden for the last year of our lives.
FYI SSI is not collected by old people per say. Old people in this case 62 for early retirement and 67 for full benefits, can collect SS after filling the 40 quarter requirement.
SSI is a disability portion of SS that can be collected at any age for varies reasons. If you want to reduce the benefits under SSI then tightening the disability requirements to collect is the only way to reduce the SSI output.