Ravenwood - 04/15/03 02:08 PM
Like most people today, Rachel Lucas is lamenting about taxes.
Furthermore, if we all had to pay that "self-employment penalty", which is simply the other half of the 15.3% Social Security tax and which employers pay for most people, we'd have an even bigger revolt.I hate to have to break this to you, Rachel, but every individual pays this tax. Just because your employer pays it out of overhead doesn't mean that employees are not ultimately paying for it. Just like your medical and dental benefits, it is a cost of doing business. As employers costs go up, the wages they pay go down.
That's not completely accurate.
Employers are allowed to deduct health-care costs. The self-employed among us aren't.
In fact, even when you pay part of those costs for your family out of your salary, you can deduct that from your taxes. The self-employed among us can not - it's a deduction specifically denied to us.
With insurance premiums running well into five figures for a family of four, that's a pretty serious penalty (often more than $4,000) that truly is an inequity.
Posted by: Joe Christmas at January 19, 2004 1:03 PM
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