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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael M who wrote (71885)	1/10/2000 12:58:00 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 108807

You may have something, I will mull it over.....

To: Michael M who wrote (71885)	1/10/2000 1:23:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Any move to means test SS benefits effectively increases the amount of money for politicians to buy votes with -- it also skews tremendously, the progressive aspects of the tax rate. I seriously doubt that Lizzie's tax bill is going down one dime if rich geezers are frozen out. The effect is going to be, pay more -- get less. Well, here we go again, for the millionth time, I am concerned with FAIRNESS. Therefore, whether my tax bill goes down or not is immaterial to me - I consider these "your bill won't go down if ours goes up" to be a diversionary measure. In general terms, I wanted to mention this situation from a 30-year old worker's pov, which is not related directly to Michael's post - but this is as good a place as any... Right now, SS Fica taxes are (for all i&p) either 8K/year or 13K/year for each individual depending on whether someone is a sole proprietor or not (and there is an employee match involved). Additionally, medicare taxes are about 1.25% of a paycheck. Realistically you are looking at a payout of about 9K/year to SS/Medicare for an individual worker on the low side. At the same time, personnel departments are doing a hard-sell to get people under 40 into their respective 401K programs or sep-ira's etc. Employees are reminded that SS likely will Not be enough for retirement, and they must save.... finally - these 401K providers like fidelity provide charts and graphs of the time value of their investments. So here you have a worker contemplating a $2000/year investment into a 401K program, where fidelity says will equate to a million by the time they retire - while at the same time they can see a 9 - 13K (or more) deduction coming out of their check which won't be enough! If there wasn't such an abundance of financial info provided by 401K providers then there would be less awareness of the gross inequity here. But it is what it is... the really disgusting thing is the total lack of leadership among politicians that have done nothing to solve this problem even though it has been building for 30 years! It would help if the AARP would stop lying to people too.