Ravenwood - 02/22/05 06:00 AM
I just wanted to take a moment to try to put the Social Security tax into perspective. If you earn $90,000 a year or more, you are paying $930 a month in Social Security tax. It's a flat tax of 12.4% (excluding Medicare), so if you make $45,000 a year, your payment is still a hefty $465 a month.
If you weren't forced (at the point of a gun, mind you) to pour your money down the Social Security rat hole, you could buy a pretty nice ride. Dump that into any retirement or investment vehicle and you are likely to take care of all your retirement needs. Or you could send your kid to a pretty nice college. Personally, I'm already taking care of my retirement, so I like to think of all the neat guns I could buy with that money.
But the point is that we don't have a choice. We don't have the individual freedom to decide what to do with that money. The government is stealing 12.4% of your income because they think you are too stupid to spend it yourself.
That's a misguided complaint. The SS tax is revenue like any other revenue. It has nothing to do with your retirement, except loosely.
In the meantime, it's the best kind of tax, a flat tax; and it gets revenue the best way. They should in fact repeal the income tax and replace it with a higher social security tax to get the same revenue.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at February 22, 2005 5:38 PMRon,
You seem to be confusing implementation with benefit. It's not the implementation of the Social Security tax I have a problem with. It's the fact that I am pouring money down a rathole from which I derive very little benefit.
Posted by: Ravenwood at February 22, 2005 8:56 PMThat's true of every tax you pay. This happens to be a good tax, in that everybody has the same stake in it, to the extent it's a flat tax.
So politically, it doesn't suffer (yet) from the artificial vote-selling scheme of raising the taxes on the other guy. You can always divide the population so a majority taxes a minority more, where previously they majority and minority had agreed that (say) 25% was the highest marginal rate that anybody should pay, everybody answering as if it would apply to them as well.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at February 23, 2005 2:32 AMI'm sorry Ron. I just can't bring myself to think of any tax as a "good tax".
Posted by: Ravenwood at February 23, 2005 6:21 AMAnd pardon me for thinking that more of my money should stay in my pocket.
Posted by: Ravenwood at February 23, 2005 8:58 AM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
