Reply #5: Payroll taxes were originally designed

[Warpy]

...to be a pay as you go old age insurance program. However, rich right wingers hate this program because they don't feel they get the maximum benefit from it, and have been hitting the panic button about its going insolvent since it was instituted in the 1930s.

Reagan doubled the payroll tax supposedly to shore up this very unstable program <sarcasm>, and then used the double payment to fudge the books on his tax cuts for the rich. Half your FICA tax, plus half the contribution from your employer, became a back door income tax, going into the general fund, again to fudge the books on more tax cuts for the rich with the jerk in the WH now.

Both parties have approved raiding social security for pork projects, corporate tax breaks, and giveaways to the wealthy.

Income tax has deductions, and the more you earn, the more deductions you can claim. FICA is paid on the first penny earned, with no deductions at all, and taxable income is capped at a laughably low $87,900. Thus doubling FICA hit the poorest workers the hardest, and continues to do so, as the government piles up worthless IOUs for their pet projects and giveaways to fat cats who don't need the money. It was the most regressive way possible to raise taxes on those least able to pay, so of course the Repuglicans loved it.

For those of you who think you're young and immortal and will never need social security, better think again. At the very least, it's the program that will prevent your mother in law from moving in with you when her husband's pension dies with him. It's always been more a program for elderly widows than for the young-old married couples in their early golden years. And yes, you will hit 50 some day and you won't be rich yet, and you will need it, too.

What to do? Well, obviously the earnings cap needs to be raised. I'd like to see it removed completely, give the rich that nice, simple flat tax they've always claimed to want, make it apply to all income and not just that earned by the sweat of one's brow. Make them pay back what they've looted over the past 40 years, because that's how long it's been going on.

I hope this clears things up a bit. The reich wing never mentions FICA when they talk about tax burdens and tax rates, do they? Yet 40% of your FICA is going to their tax cuts and Bush's wars, just as if it had been collected as income tax.

Be angry. Be very angry.