Social Security and Medicare are OFF THE TABLE!

archer wrote: How can a state manage a SS or Medicare type system when people move from place to place?
Will Colorado pay for you to retire on Florida? If you pay taxes for half your working life in NY then the other on CO....which state covers your retirement? Could different states have differing benefits? How would that work of you worked in 3 different states. These issues and many many others are why I think this is a federal responsibility, not one for the states.

Perhaps this is where a look at Sweden's system is valuable. I expect that the Swedish population is not as mobile as our own, but certainly there must be moves. Between counties and municipalities. They seem to handle those even though the helath care and other social programs are not centralized in the National government.

We need look only as far as adequately funding our own unique system with adequate revenue enhancements. Having those who make over $106,800 pay an additional amount will solve the problem for the next 100 years...

LadyJazzer wrote: We need look only as far as adequately funding our own unique system with adequate revenue enhancements. Having those who make over $106,800 pay an additional amount will solve the problem for the next 100 years...

Revenue enhancement, George Orwell will be proud.

archer wrote: How can a state manage a SS or Medicare type system when people move from place to place?
Will Colorado pay for you to retire on Florida? If you pay taxes for half your working life in NY then the other on CO....which state covers your retirement? Could different states have differing benefits? How would that work of you worked in 3 different states. These issues and many many others are why I think this is a federal responsibility, not one for the states.

Au contraire, at that point the keeping regular of interstate affairs, a legitimate power actually ceded from the states to the general government, comes into play. Whether it is the transfer of the monies residing in your former state to your new one or the contribution from your new state into your account within your old state, or perhaps even a general location for all of the states to deposit the monies that they collect. The possibilities are greatly expanded, and thus so is your freedom.

Perhaps you trust yourself to manage the funds better than the elected officials, or you only wish to allow them to control half of the money. Perhaps some states will pool the money and distribute it equally among all the contributors for that year. Others might choose to allow you to purchase an annuity worth a certain figure upon retirement and withhold from you and your employer money necessary to fund that instrument. Some may choose a defined benefit, others may choose a defined contribution. But we then have 50 states overseeing the affairs of their citizens as the Constitution intended.

The majority of the people have lost faith in the ability of the general government to oversee what they view as a critical area. 6 out of 10 have lost confidence in the general government and 8 in 10 view some measure of security as vital. We tried it the progressive way for the last 70 years and here we are. What say we try the intended way for the next 70. The states couldn't do much worse than the federal has done after all and if one state fails, at least the rest of us only have to look at coming up with the funds for that state instead of funds for all of the states in the wake of the federated system failing to the extent that it has. The current unfunded liability of the Social Security system, the burden that the posterity is currently saddled with if we keep on operating in the same fashion as we have for the last 70+ years, is larger than the $14 Trillion public debt; and it will only continue to get worse even if we remove the cap as we have done for Medicare. Removing the current cap on the Social Security portion of the tax pushes back the dates being talked about by a whopping 7 years - th-th-th-that's all folks. There are simply not enough people making more than this amount to make up for the difference between incoming revenues and what is paid out in benefits. The current cap covers nearly 90% of the income earned. The additional amount above and beyond what those who make more than $107K per year and their employers already pay isn't a big enough plug for the hole in the dike.

We may have quite a few people who have managed to acquire a million dollars in assets over the course of their lives, but we actually have very few who earn that amount each and every year. That, and the additional $100K in tax burden imposed upon them by removing the cap might just be enough to push them into semi or fully retiring rather than working. They already have millions or billions of dollars in assets if their income is that high each year - so it isn't like they really need to keep working simply to hand another $100K in taxes over to be wasted by the politicians in Washington. The privilege tax is levied on income, not capital gains after all, so the massive tax increase is simply going to serve as an incentive to obtain the money as something other than income. Don't you worry, our millionaire president, along with the millionaire Senators and Representatives, aren't any more interested in paying more taxes themselves than the rest of the millionaire special interests that fund their campaign are. I'm sure they will leave a loophole or 30 in any bill which removes the cap. I noticed that none of those millionaire representatives in the federated government were willing to lead by example this last April and send 39% of their income to the IRS in spite of call to raise the legal tax rate to that amount. Heck, this president has made it almost a condition of employment that his advisers must have failed to pay the taxes they did owe, let along set an example of paying more than that amount to give substance to their argument that everyone as rich as they are be willing to fork over that amount.

It is immoral for us to appropriate the labor of the posterity of the nation to provide a measure of individual security for us in our later years. To allow the Ponzi to continue when we know, as we have known for the last 30 years, that it must ultimately result in either a failure to provide the promise upon which our participation was initially requested and granted or an obscene level of confiscation of the fruits of the labor of the posterity along with an equally obscene tax levied against them disguised and collected from them by the industry which employs them.

The privilege tax started out at 2% of wages and was to increase to 6% by 1949. It is now over double that at 12.5% of wages. Is a small measure of security worth the confiscation of 20% of those wages or even more before the posterity see a single penny of benefit from their own labor? We all know that the employers who contribute the same amount as is taken from our own check collect that money from our fellow citizens for submission to the general government, don't we? We are smart enough to see through the shell game and understand that we are paying the entire 12.5% of the wages that are remitted to fund the program aren't we?

Spoken like a true Sovereign Citizen... Sorry, I'm not interested in that form of extremism.

Taxes are not "confiscation"; Yes, taxes have increased from the time they were instituted nearly 100 years ago..The price of gold is up..It is called "inflation". I'm not interested in your Federalist/Jeffersonian 18th-century view of anachronism. It wasn't that long ago that the top rate was 70%. And yes, they're talking about letting the Bush tax-cuts sunset, and letting them go back to the Reagan-era level, which would add a [not] whopping 3.6% to the top rate... (Oh, the horror.)

If you have a source that removing the $106,800 cap on income for Medicare would only extend the trust fund by 7 years, I'd like to see it. What I found says that "removing the payroll tax cap would extend the life of the Trust Fund to 2083." (I seriously doubt that that number, since all of the Baby-Boomers will be dead by then.) Someone making $109,000 pays about 7.25% on their income, and someone that makes $1,900,000 would pay 0.725% of their income. Boo-friggin'-hoo.... Would subjecting ALL income to it save the system? Absolutely. Would raising the age to 70 help? Yes, that would reduce the outlays by about 6%. It's better to fix it than this teabagger nonsense of handing an 80-year with health problems a voucher and telling them, "Good luck...Go find something on the open market. That nice man at the insurance company will be there to help you."

LadyJazzer wrote: Someone making $109,000 pays about 7.25% on their income, and someone that makes $1,900,000 would pay 0.725% of their income.

I'm not clear what those figures represent. Care to elaborate? Removing the cap would be a 6.2% tax increase (or 12.4% if you include the employer portion) for all income over $106,800. So that should be a much bigger increase for someone making $1,900,000 since much more of that income (most all of it) is subject to the 6.2% increase. So I'm thinking you are referring to something else?

So far as where PrintSmith's numbers come from, I'm just guessing, but perhaps he is talking about lifting the cap for just the employee's portion, while you are talking about removing the cap for both the employee's and employer's portion of SS?

Here is a recent article that gives many options to fix SS. I'd prefer a more balanced approach of combining several of the fixes. For instance, increasing the current tax from 6.2% to 7.3% would also fix the problem (article isn't clear, but I assume that would be for both employee and employer). Maybe combine a smaller such increase with a partial increase of the cap plus some other suggestions?

http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-to-retire/2010/05/18/12-ways-to-fix-social-security


And after all that, we still have to fix Medicare which is even in a much bigger mess.

Since the current population of voters overwhelmingly want to keep theze programs I have no issue in requiring them to likewise pay for it. Thogh intellectually I'd like the ability for people to opt out, we all know many would do so, spend their money and then either force society to pay for them later or watch them starve in the street. I don't think Americans have the moral tolerance for that.

pineinthegrass wrote:

LadyJazzer wrote: Someone making $109,000 pays about 7.25% on their income, and someone that makes $1,900,000 would pay 0.725% of their income.

I'm not clear what those figures represent. Care to elaborate? Removing the cap would be a 6.2% tax increase (or 12.4% if you include the employer portion) for all income over $106,800. So that should be a much bigger increase for someone making $1,900,000 since much more of that income (most all of it) is subject to the 6.2% increase. So I'm thinking you are referring to something else?

So far as where PrintSmith's numbers come from, I'm just guessing, but perhaps he is talking about lifting the cap for just the employee's portion, while you are talking about removing the cap for both the employee's and employer's portion of SS?

Here is a recent article that gives many options to fix SS. I'd prefer a more balanced approach of combining several of the fixes. For instance, increasing the current tax from 6.2% to 7.3% would also fix the problem (article isn't clear, but I assume that would be for both employee and employer). Maybe combine a smaller such increase with a partial increase of the cap plus some other suggestions?

http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-to-retire/2010/05/18/12-ways-to-fix-social-security


And after all that, we still have to fix Medicare which is even in a much bigger mess.

I think we are saying the same thing... Remove the cap on the employee's portion, but leave it in-place for the employer. That seems fair to me.

chickaree wrote: Since the current population of voters overwhelmingly want to keep theze programs I have no issue in requiring them to likewise pay for it. Thogh intellectually I'd like the ability for people to opt out, we all know many would do so, spend their money and then either force society to pay for them later or watch them starve in the street. I don't think Americans have the moral tolerance for that.

I'd tend to agree. If the voters want to save the program then I think it's only fair that they all share in the burden of doing so (at least the working ones).

The current cap of about $106,800 represents roughly the top 10% of income earners. Right now they pay about 70% of all income tax. If we just remove the cap, then they will also have the full burden of saving Social Security as well. This in effect makes Social Security more and more of a welfare program rather than a retirement program. So I'd prefer to raise the SS tax for everyone (less than 1% increase), plus other changes (including a partial increase in the cap) to make the program solvent.

http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html

And if you did fix SS by eliminating the cap for just the employee's portion and not the employer's as well, I doubt that alone will fix SS. The article I linked in my previous post wasn't clear about it, though. So I'll need to double check later.

chickaree wrote: Since the current population of voters overwhelmingly want to keep theze programs I have no issue in requiring them to likewise pay for it. Thogh intellectually I'd like the ability for people to opt out, we all know many would do so, spend their money and then either force society to pay for them later or watch them starve in the street. I don't think Americans have the moral tolerance for that.

Good post Chickadee- Everyone loves Social Security. And Republicans will find that out the hard way in the next election cycle.