Look, I used your data for the bottom 50% of households to check your claim that that group only paid 5% of FICA taxes. Nonsense.
Now you seem to want to weasel around on what wage earners are, what households are, and what other "transfer taxes" do to negate FICA. Other transfer taxes have NO effect whatsoever on FICA. FICA is FICA. If you want to claim that EIC is designed to offset FICA, fine, but FICA is still FICA and the working poor pay it starting at $1 one, and there is NO deduction for this (despite your former claim about SE's, LOL, which is simply treating self-employed the same way employed are treated, i.e. the employer portion is both FICA and Income tax free)
You can bookmark this message and bludgeon me in a few years with it if I'm wrong but any attempts to raise FICA to include non-wage income or raise it to include the last dollar of income will fail to raise the FICA burden on that elusive top 1%, those we call rich, and attempts to do so will instead fall squarely on the same middle class everyone wants to save. When you don't need additional income to live, there are a lot of things you can do to have that income be unrealized and untaxable. Raising taxes on the rich has the usual effect, increasing the profitability of tax avoidance.
TAX avoidance must remain legal, and it is pretty simple to raise FICA taxes from the rich by two methods: 1) upping the cap and 2) changing the base to include non-wage income. The math is very simple, and the laws to make avoidance extremely difficult and risky are simple as well.
But this is all irrelevant anyway. My point is simply that tax rates on the wage earning lower tiers are in fact 15.3% higher than generally claimed. Forget all the nonsense about how that relates to households and dependents. Further, the supposed separation between government income and expenses between general funds and SS funds, is just an illusion in practice, so why change the accounting methods to be more realistic. Call tax tax, and call expenditures expenditures. If you do all that, then FICA goes away, EIC goes away and indeed you get to see directly from the tax tables, what the tax rate is for any individual, and it would be clear that for some at the bottom end, the tax rate is negative assuming the tables have been readjusted for all the current programs. |
