Social Security Defender Archive: Including Northwest Plan Docs/Spreadsheets
I have been working off and on, well mostly off because of ‘life’ and ‘laziness’, since 2010 on a project I modestly called the Social Security Defender. It is all built around a Google account and so has a Google+ page, a blog, an e-mail address and a Google Drive.
Today I am going live with a Public Folder in its Google Drive called the Social Security Defender Archive. In this folder are a series of other folders including ones devoted to The Northwest Plan for a Real Social Security Fix and to Social Security Reports and to CBO & OMB Documents and Reports. Plus others. In all cases the documents should be viewable, linkable, and downloadable even as there is no ‘write’ capacity.
So this is an open invitation to try out the Archive, to see what works, what doesn’t, what is useless and could be deleted and what is missing that should be added. I expect to be actively curating the Archive over the next week or so, in particular adding in a lot of material relating to the 2015 Social Security Report, including broken out Figures and Tables, as well as updated versions of the Northwest Plan with 2015 Report data included.
The e-mail address for this account, which is also my e-mail for Angry Bear related matters is:
socsec dot defender at gmail.com. Comments there or left her are more than welcome. Thanx.
Hi Bruce and thank you for the excellent work you provided on SS details and facts… I looked at the simple view provided of the Yes magazine chart. It shows 3 options to sustaining SS solvency. The one I feel most compelling and most reasonable and common sense is the option to have no cap on withholding where everybody pays the same percentage rate regardless of earnings. Why do so many want to obfuscate the problem? Also if to privatize is to profitize then why would anyone want to take their safety net and put it at risk in a casino market place?
There are a lot of answers to these questions. Taking them in reverse order.
Private/personal accounts poll very poorly. Few people actually want to put THEIR safety net at risk. But there are several camps of people who want to put OTHER people’s nets at risk. First those who hope to profit via fees. Second those who believe that market based solutions are always more efficient and/or that Social Security should capture the equity premium. Third are those who hate government and government solutions and believe instead that “government is the problem”. The main difference between the latter two groups is that many neo-libs would like a personal account system to work for seniors while the second couldn’t give a crap, people should be responsible for their own retirement, health care, education etc.
As to raising the cap. Well once again there are four basic groups opposed. One believes that Social Security was always unsustainable or even a Ponzi game and the answer is not to keep throwing resources at it but instead find some way to pull the plug. A related group simply hates paying taxes of any sort. But a third group, to whom Coberly firmly belongs and me tentatively believes that the original structure of Title 2 as worker funded insurance, taking nothing away from capital and so owing nothing to capital, has worked well and provided the political insulation needed to protect it from those who would kill it. The way this is generally phrased is that we should not turn it from ‘insurance’ to ‘welfare’.
The final group, and probably the smallest, consists of me and a few others, often converts of mine or disciples of Dean Baker or both, who believe that a cap increase is the wrong solution to this particular problem. Instead we believe the problem is rooted in inadequate distributions from productivity on the front end, that is workers are getting cheated of their due, and that the numbers show that if we restored the historical link between productivity and Real Wage then much of the problem would have solved itself. And the rest could be addressed by a forthright emphasis on job creation and wage enhancement by the Fed and other policy makers rather than an abject fear that good news for workers will inevitably trigger hyperinflation and so needs to be stamped out.
I summarize the program of this last group as MJ.ABW – More Jobs at Better Wages.
There is also a third line of argumentation that has people who believe in increasing marginal rates, which in effect is what a cap increase does, is an excellent idea. But that we shouldn’t throw the opportunity to do so on a program that really doesn’t face the same degree of crisis as the rest of the progressive agenda. In this view raising the cap for a Social Security ‘crisis’ 20 years out crowds out the possibility for using that marginal rate increase to fund early childhood education or anti-hunger projects or anything else. And in doing so plays into the hands of the ‘government is the problem’ folk. After all if this 80 year old program is in such trouble, why let ourselves start new ones.
Bruce
well, I’d add another group to those who oppose SS: Those who hate the idea of “idle” workers… even those who paid for their own retirement. You can see this in the rantings of Alan Simpson and even statements by Pete Peterson when he isn’t being careful to be everyone’s rich uncle giving sound advice about personal finance.
These people generalize that hate: they hate working people. This may sound paranoid, but it works on the basis of the same psychology that leads people to hate jews or blacks: “we hate them because we treat them badly.”
These people are, of course, the people who hate “government,” but their propaganda has been successful to the point where more or less decent people hate government because they fear “communism,” or just don’t like paying taxes or being told what to do by “the government.”
And, on a really paranoid note, these people… those who hate the working class… are also very much involved in a “conspiracy” to rule the world. Nothing very paranoid about this, it’s what everyone is doing who has the power to have a reasonable prospect of pulling it off. And it is not a “secret” conspiracy. It’s quite out in the open, although not all of their “dealings” are.
Keeping workers insecure, and promoting the politics that keeps the workers insecure, is just a reasonable policy for promoting and securing their aims.
Ryan
and you are the other side of the coin.
First, a hopeless suggestion: try to realize that what is “most reasonable and common sense” to you is “dangerous nonsense” to someone else.
There really is no standard to judge what is “reasonable and common sense.” And it is dangerous to yourself to take your own reason and common sense as “god given truth.”
In the present case: Social Security works exactly because it is not welfare, not a “tax on the rich.” It is paid for by the workers themselves. This is not giving the workers money either from the government or from the tooth fairy. It is simply a way to provide the workers a way to save their own money for their own retirement that is protected from inflation and market losses and even from most forms of personal bad luck, or even improvidence, that can destroy a person’s ability to retire when he is old, or destroy his family’s security should he die or become disabled before he gets old.
Do not destroy Social Security in order to turn it into welfare. “The rich” already pay “their fair share” in the form of the payroll tax up to, but not beyond, the point where it represents a reasonable cost of insurance for them “just in case” they ended up poor in old age.
And, just to try to be clear
I do not disagree with Bruce or Dean Baker: more jobs at better pay would certainly solve the SS projected deficit.
But SS is insurance against hard time. We need to keep that insurance “solvent” while we find a way to create those more jobs at better pay.
The virtue of the “Northwest Plan” is that it does just that. And if the more jobs at better pay materialize in time to save SS, the “Northwest Plan” would “do nothing,” which is, or was, Bruce’s preferred plan.
typo
hard times, not hard time.
hard times is what we have and will get worse.
hard time is what i will get if either the Right or the Left ever get within reach of establishing their Rule.
Plus we know without a doubt that the first two or three annual iterations of Northwest are needed. Social Security DI faces a crisis not seen since 1982, a Trust Fund going to depletion in less than 18 months and so requiring benefit cuts. An immediate increase of 0.2% in FICA followed by one or two 0.1% increases would under current projections fund DI through the 76 year window while also serving as a proof of concept for Northwest. If people were convinced then continuing Northwest after 2018 to address OAS would be a seamless and effective method of addressing the problem. Which would THEN open the door for a package of policy changes directed at MJ.ABW. Which if successful would allow the ratcheting down of scheduled increases in FICA under NW.
The fundamental advantage of Northwest is that it is an immediate and permanent fix yet totally flexible. That apparent paradox is because the immediate and permanent part is the method and the flexibility is in its openness to data infused adjustments in magnitude and sign of scheduled rate changes, which is to say its operation.
Coberly, ““The rich” already pay “their fair share” in the form of the payroll tax up to, but not beyond, the point where it represents a reasonable cost of insurance for them “just in case” they ended up poor in old age.”
That is certainly true, but only in regards to the Social Security budget. The rich have not been paying a fair share of the general budget and that is made possible because the Treasury is covering the general budget deficit by selling notes (that is, borrowing money) from all manner of buyers, including other nations, banks and private individuals and the Social Security Trust Fund. The problem comes along when the deceivers want to describe the debt to the Trust Fund as a cost to the government that is unsupportable. I wonder what would happen if those same deceitful propagandists suggested that paying the Treasury debts to China, England, Chase and Citi Banks is also an unsupportable burden on our economy?
So no, the rich should not pay a disproportionate share of FICA, which flows into the Trust Fund. However the rich should pay a greater share of the general tax revenues because they have had a long tax holiday and they have a hugely disproportionate share of both continuous income and existing wealth. Where else is an increase in tax revenues directed at the general budget going to come from? It is the general budget that is in deep trouble, not the Social Security budget. That is why the deceivers want to talk about the “unified budget”, a concept that does not exist in our laws.
Jack
I agree with you entirely.
In fact, I’d like to see a “patriotic deficit emergency surtax” of about ten percent on incomes over $113k (that was the SS tax cap the last time i looked)… until “the deficit” ceases to be an emergency.
The money could be used for infrastructure, small business loans, non usurious student loans, supporting basic research, setting up local health care clinics, the more generous welfare my Left friends think SS should pay for by raising the cap…
My tax increase proposal is of course no more likely to happen than the “scrap the cap” tax increase proposal. But at least it (the proposal) will not be used by “the rich” to say “see, Social Security is going to raise our taxes and be a staggering burden on the young (millionaires).”
But there is a hard core of Leftists who accuse me of being a shill for the rich. I accuse them of being verdant agents provocateurs for Peterson.
Jack: “The rich have not been paying a fair share….”
Please define “fair”, as a general concept.
“The rich” are paying a far greater share of their income to the government than the middle class and poor are.
Including State and Local? Including what the Freshwater Economists insist are pass through of corporate taxes to prices and so consumers? Adjusted for who actually benefits more from such entities as the Federal Courts (enforcement of contracts) the Coast Guard (rescuing yachts and suppressing piracy) even the military (defending overseas interests of American corporations)?
Please try looking up numbers for total incidence of taxes and effective rates rather than this. Plus how would you balance this out? Eliminate personal and dependent deductions? Which vastly reduce or eliminate federal income tax burden for the poor? Or maybe eliminate EITC? Which to a lot of folks minds are simply a subsidy to low wage employers? Kill the mortgage tax deduction?
You know Everything is Simple. If You Ignore the Complexities. And this is nowhere more true than the Federal Tax Code and simplistic arguments about incidence of Federal income tax that ignore other taxes and how the Federal code has been adjusted (with full input by the rich) to encourage such things as charitable deductions and homeownership are simple special pleading. “American corporations pay the highest rates in the world!!!”. Yes under a very restricted definition of the words ‘pay’ and ‘rates’.
Note I haven’t even got into bigger issues of distribution from productivity and various types of rent seeking that effect pre-tax income. And you want us to define ‘fair’. Well right back at ya.
Warren:
The dollar amount is greater; but, not the percentage. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=4208&topic2ID=40&topic3ID=&DocTypeID=1
Warren
It’s perfectly obvious:
when you are six and your sister is five and she gets a bigger piece of your burfday cake, it’s no fair.
And that is as good as discussions of “fair” ever get.
The “rich” who think it’s no fair that they pay a higher percent of their income in taxes are insane.
The poor who think “the rich” should pay for their retirement are… well, like your six year old.
I think the poor ought to be able to retire at a decent age, and if their Social Security is not enough, even after having been adjusted quite generously to provide the “insurance” that SS was designed to provide, should be able to get “welfare” or some kind of old age pension from the government… that is not the same as Social Security.
But I have no respect whatsoever for those middle to upper class self called progressives who demand “the rich” “pay their fair share” for SS. The rich do pay their fair share. Making them pay more would destroy Social Security in one of two ways:
most likely is that it will alarm “the rich” just to call for “scrap the cap” and they will fight against that and SS in general until they destroy it.
OR the left could win an election and impose a “scrap the cap” tax on “the rich”, to which the Petersons will just say “oh, noes, not the briar patch!” and set about “reforming” SS by making it “more fair” and turning it into welfare as we knew it… first by means testing it, and then by persuading those who can’t pass the means test that it is “too expensive.”
And because it will be “just another tax” (instead of a worker paid retirement insurance for workers) it will be easy to cut, because no one will be “for” it, except the very poor, and the very poor have never counted for much in elections. never. not even with the help of the tender hearted left.
“The poor who think ‘the rich’ should pay for their retirement are… well, like your six year old.
“I think the poor ought to be able to retire at a decent age, and if their Social Security is not enough, even after having been adjusted quite generously to provide the ‘insurance’ that SS was designed to provide, should be able to get ‘welfare’ or some kind of old age pension from the government….”
Does that make you like the six-year-old — or just partly, because you think they should fund some of it themselves through Social Security?
Run75441: “The dollar amount is greater; but, not the percentage.”
The link you provided says that the percentage is greater. The only step at which “Average Federal Tax Rate” decreases with increased income is between the “Less than $10k” income group and the “$10k-$20k” income group. Everywhere else, higher income means higher average federal tax rate.
Warren:
“The rich” are paying a far greater share of their income to the government than the middle class and poor are.”
Depends as what you define middle class as. I tend to think middle class is greater than median income. If we analyze just the $100-$200,000 alone, they own 24.5% of the Federal Tax share which is 1/2 of 1% greater than those who make >$1 million (24% of Federal Tax Share). In any case the >$1 million are not paying far greater than the middle class. Again, it depends on how you define rich in income. There is an argumment for what is rich today also
“And you want us to define ‘fair’. Well right back at ya.”
I want those who cry about the rich “not paying their fair share” to define FAIR.
Yeah and I want a pony.
You deploy a shitty lazy decades old right econ talking point on a economics site and demand that we give you answers?
Try this one: Fairness would have been equal enforcement of the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and its successors instead of allowing the rich to use its provisions exclusively against the rights of the working class to actually negotiate for wages in a fair and free marketplace. (Which BTW the rich insist actually exists.) Instead for the last many hundreds (indeed thousands) of years we have allowed the wealthy to have effective and often open control over the political powers of the State and so the police powers and have used that to enforce a power-based inequality of distribution of gains from productivity to themselves. The advent of universal political suffrage in Britain, the U.S. and other Western countries in the late 19th and early 20th century gave some countries a start on redressing that existing power imbalance through democratic means with the wealthy fighting to maintain their political and economic privilege the entire way. That effort to equalize economic power through political means stalled out in the 1980s and in the last thirty five years has reversed all the equity that had been achieved and returned us to what many openly call the Second Gilded Age. What small d democrats believe is “Fair” is a return to the conditions of the twenty or so years post WWII that marked the biggest and mostly widest expansion of material wealth in history (if you were white anyway). Instead we are faced with an economic and political system that uses a totally bullshit and ahistoric theory that all distributions from productivity are made perfectly and equitably by the free market as guided by the metaphoric Invisible Hand. Which is bullshit and which demonstration of its bullshittery is a prime focus of the Angry Bear econoblog.
So that is one answer to the question of “Define FAIR”.
Another is: Piss up a rope you wanker and take that tired crap to RedState or FreeRepublic where you can be cheered for your bravery in taking it right to the teeth of those commies at Angry Bear.
I would be less harsh except that I asked what I thought was a fair question myself.
The reason poor working class people pay little or no tax is because a combination of personal and dependent exemptions plus an in-origin Republican Earned Income Tax Credit reduces their tax burden. The basic idea being that we shouldn’t tax base levels of subsistence. People further up the income scale are able to reduce their tax burden by a combination of deductions for mortgage interest and local property tax and for contributions to charity. The idea here being that it is in society’s interest to promote home-ownership and direct charity. The simple result of these measures, even in the absence of progressive tax rates, would be to shift the incidence of taxes up the income ladder. People who complain that 47% of the people don’t pay income taxes are effectively saying that we should tax subsistence by eliminating such things as personal and dependent deductions. Which is not unprecedented, indeed the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher tried to do much the same thing by introducing a Uniform Poll (meaning ‘Head’) Tax in Britain that would bear in equal amounts on rich and poor. A little sociopathic if you ask me but in some sense “Fair”. But the point being that you can’t just bring up a simple arithmetic consequence of having some income being sheltered from taxes (subsistence and to some degree housing) as proof that the resultant imbalance in incidence is ipso facto “unfair”. Unless you are willing to go all the way down the Libertarian path to “Taxation is Theft”. You want “Fair” propose some alternate structures, don’t ask me to do your homework for you.
Warren
i don’t follow your logic.
the six year old was complaining that something was no fair.
my thought about a welfare supplement to Social Security said nothing about “fair.” I believe it is good economics as well as decent human behavior to prevent people from starving in the streets.
my little essay on “what is fair” was intended to suggest to you that there is no answer to that question…. it all depends on who is answering it.
from my perspective, SS as currently designed is absolutely fair.
i am afraid i would say that welfare, as needed, is also absolutely fair and does NOT depend on somehow taxes being either absolutely equal, or equal percent of income, or equal percent of “benefits from government” or equal percent of marginal value of dollar as a function of income, or fair as a matter of “justice” to the poor … “whose money was stolen by the rich”… or fair as a matter of “justice” to the rich… who work harder than the poor and make jobs.
can you understand that?
Warren
statistical abstracts of the united states says that effective rate of income tax for the next to the richest cohort is about seventeen percent. for the richest it is 25%
this is more than i pay. so if you are looking at income tax only, statistical abstracts supports your view. liberals like to add the payroll “tax” into the count and call the whole 12.,4% a tax on the poor. They are wrong on two counts… mostly payroll tax is not a tax: you get the money back with interest, MORE interest if you are in the lower end of the lifetime income scale. and while “most economists” say the employers share is “really” the employees money…. they are talking about a something in the “land beside”. the land beside reality where theories and illusions are more “really” and the actual experience of real human beings counts for nothing.
Does “they own 24% of the federal tax share…. ”
mean that the class of people who have incomes between 100 and 200k has the same number of people in it as the class of people who have incomes over a million?
I don’t remember for sure, but I think the class of taxpayers making over 100k (a few years back) made the same amount of money as the class of taxpayers making less than 100k.
Of course there were more people in the latter class.
To my eye the statement that those between 100 and 200 k “own the same share of federal tax” as those over 1 million… 24% each”
implies that between the two of them they “own” half the tax. leaving the other half to be owned by those less than 100k PLUS those between 200k and 1 million. Doesn’t seem right to me.
note the “” “”” here are meant to suggest a paraphrase, not an exact quote. please feel free to check the original.
coberly:
M = 000
There is a wealth of information here: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=4208&topic2ID=40&topic3ID=&DocTypeID=1 Take a look and see for yourself. 15 million taxpayers make up that category ($100-200M). >$1MM was 4 tens of 1% of all household units or 673M taxpayers and they paid 24% of all “Federal Taxes.” 79.9% of all Federal Taxes are paid by people making >$100M. That is not a bad thing to be happening; however, when you match those making >$1 MM against those making $100-200M, why does the former get off so lightly?
I believe the more interesting question is what is middle class? I do not believe it to be Median Income anymore as it has more likely shifted upwards. I do not believe the middle of the income needs to be Middle Class. Lets look at it another way, EPI suggests it takes $48,000 annually (avg.? family of 4) to get by. That numeric is almost Median. Another way to look at it is the AMT which appied to the rich when it first started. The rich at $250,000.
Anyhoo, my two cents.
Run without consulting the Sociology texts I think the situation is that Americans assume that class follows a Normal Distribution with the Middle Class extending to the 10% range on either side. Whereas Britain I think have a more realistic version that sees class as a pyramid. Me I see it as looking more like a snail with a short fat tail and a long, long neck. You could probably do worse than saying less than $10/hr ($20k/year) Poor, $10-$20/hr ($40k) Working Class, $20-40 ($80k) Middle Class, $40-80/hr ($160k) Upper Middle. This I think would take in pretty much the entire Administrative/Government/Middle Management sectors on down. Leaving an Upper Class made up mostly of people in entertainment (time bounded mostly), upper tiers of professions (e.g. Law and Medicine) and Finance. Plus of course the actual people of wealth. Of whom there are a zillion gradations.
Off the top of my head I think there is a problem with people assuming that percentage of income somehow corresponds to percentage of people, that there are just as many people making over the 90% of income range and those in the bottom 10%. But this I think doesn’t follow at all, it is just us getting tangled up between medians and modes and means and incomes and households and workers and dependents.
The most absurd thing about this post is that disk space had to be occupied with it at all.
“Defending” a wildly popular and successful program that has dramatically cut poverty rates among the elderly since it’s inception? One that has never added a penny to the deficit?
It ought to be a scandal that the only force Social Security needs defending from is largely wielded by nut job billionaire plutocrats. And their sadly deluded teabagger followers. Pitiful.
Bruce: “You deploy a shitty lazy decades old right econ talking point on a economics site and demand that we give you answers?”
Hey, Bruce, I’m not the one who started the “it’s not fair!” B.S.
Coming up with examples of “such-and-such would be ‘fair'” and “so-and-so would be ‘fair'” does not define the word “fair”.
Maybe you didn’t start it, but you were sure quick enough to pivot off it to making that claim. Which by implication was meant to rebut Jack’s “fair” without him needing to define anything at all. Don’t play innocent “I was just seeking clarification here” or anything like it. You made a claim I asked YOU to justify it.
Coberly: “[My] thought about a welfare supplement to Social Security said nothing about ‘fair.’ I believe it is good economics as well as decent human behavior to prevent people from starving in the streets.”
Then I apologize. It did seems like you were saying that the rich should pay for the retirement of the poor.
Run
thanks for the link. i have bookmarked it.
but it does make it hard for me to understand your point in your comment at 5:02 p.m.
the people between 100 and 200 k pay 24.5% of the taxes.
the people over 1M pay 24% of the taxes.
but there are 27 million people in the first category
and 700 thousand in the second.
the tax rate in the first category is 18.9%
the tax rate in the second category is 34.1%
I don’t have any opinion as to the fairness of this one way or the other.
but see my reply to Warren next.
Warren
no apology needed. but i am not following your logic. i did say i think we (the people, through our government) need to pay for welfare where it is needed.
i did not say this was fair or not fair. i did say i thought it was good for the country economically and good for us personally as human beings.
i have very loudly and repeatedly said i do not think “the rich” should pay for the retirement of “the poor.”
the working poor can pay for their own retirement via SS, which includes an insurance feature so that those who don’t earn enough over a lifetime to save enough for a minimal retirement get an “insurance” benefit that is made possible by the insurance premiums of those who make more than enough over a lifetime of earnings to save for a minimal retirement. generally those who make more than enough have other resources that provide them with a good deal more than a minimal retirement. but they might not have. it doesn’t take much of an accident to find yourself poor when you thought you were a high flyer.
but there are people whose lifetime earnings.. due to really, really bad luck… are not sufficient even with the SS insurance benefit… to sustain them in their old age. i think we… us… should help them. if for no better reason than “there but for the grace of God go I.”
This has nothing to do with “fair.” But with common prudence which also happens to turn out to be the same as common decency.
But I do mean “us’, not “the rich” except insofar as they are us.
nor do i object to a graduated income tax. there is no other way to pay for the needs of the country than to tax the rich more heavily than the poor. simply no other way. and i have a very low opinion of people who whine that “it’s no fair.” either way. … that is i don’t have a high opinion of “progressives” who say “regressive tax, regressive tax” about a program designed to save the poor from poverty by protecting their own money from losses while providing a highly progressive insurance benefit.
not much point in saying more. you don’t get it. they don’t get it.
Bruce: “Off the top of my head I think there is a problem with people assuming that percentage of income somehow corresponds to percentage of people, that there are just as many people making over the 90% of income range and those in the bottom 10%. But this I think doesn’t follow at all, it is just us getting tangled up between medians and modes and means and incomes and households and workers and dependents.”
Quite so. One of the biggest drivers of household income disparity is dual-income families. Men with higher personal incomes are more likely to be married to someone who also has an income. Women with personal income at the lower end of the scale are not likely to be married at all. Furthermore, with more women going to college than men, college-educated people are more likely to marry other college-educated people, creating even more income disparity.
Those women with college educations and careers also tend to have fewer children, and to have them later in life, and to devote more resources to educating those children.
That all, naturally, flows into the idea of normalizing household income by the square root of the household size. (Two can’t live a cheaply as one, but as cheaply as 1.41.)
In any event, all income distributions are best modeled as a chi-squared function, which lends itself to that pyramid view of class structure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/17/does-your-family-make-over-232000-congrats-youre-in-the-top-5-percent/
Coberly: “[But] there are people whose lifetime earnings.. due to really, really bad luck… are not sufficient even with the SS insurance benefit… to sustain them in their old age. I think we… us… should help them. if for no better reason than ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’
“This has nothing to do with ‘fair.’ But with common prudence which also happens to turn out to be the same as common decency.”
While I agree with you that it is a Good Thing To Do, I do not think the government should be doing it. If We the People actually wanted to do that, then there would be enough charity to do it. The government should not override the people regarding charity.
“nor do i object to a graduated income tax. there is no other way to pay for the needs of the country than to tax the rich more heavily than the poor. simply no other way.”
I dislike the idea that a taxi driver who works sixty hours a week should be taxed more heavily — as a percentage of his income — than one who works only forty. And some of his tax is going to pay for the food stamps of the driver to only works twenty hours a week and pays no income tax at all.
Run75441, perhaps we should look to the State tax data to support your claim, not the fed tax data. This is most enlightening:
http://www.itep.org/whopays/full_report.php
Warren:
Most people stake their claim of the 1% paying more on federal taxes. It is wrong either way whether you consider federal or state.
“Most people stake their claim of the 1% paying more on federal taxes.”
As a percentage of their income, yes, they do.
Bruce: “You want ‘Fair’ propose some alternate structures, don’t ask me to do your homework for you.”
I’m not the one complaining that “the rich don’t pay their fair share.”
All I asked is for the person who made that claim define FAIR as a general term (just pull something out of dictionary.com if you want), and then explain how the system of income tax, capital gains tax, and estate tax does not fit that definition.