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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (12855)	8/21/2003 5:38:17 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

Insulting me with the Rush Limbaugh crap only makes you look desperate. I have a wonderful picture of myself and my husband standing between Al and Tipper taken at the Vice President's residence. Would you like my argument better if I told you I made the same one to them? The standard Democratic argument is that the government will spend your money in a better way than you can. They don't trust those poor people will actually spend that money on a retirement fund or on medical insurance, so they do it for them! It is a transfer tax. It's a self contained within itself as other insurance plans are, the receipts are segregated, as are the payments. The only cross over is that they use the surplus to purchase Treasury bonds which are then used for the general fund. But if you think about it, it makes sense since this would be the most conservative investment that could be made (I for one wouldn't like it if they bought CSCO or foreign bonds with it).If you don't believe me read the OASDI trustee reports. It's great reading if you're having a hard time falling asleep. ssa.gov The only way the American people would allow it is if it was limited to a income ceiling. The reasoning is that the benefits have a ceiling. Some fairly wise people knew that SS would grow to a size that would swallow the general fund. When it started, it was around 3% of a person's income. You aren't the only person who has tried to argue that 15.3% SS is more than the 35% marginal tax that the higher end tax payer pays on income not subject to SS. The schools in this country are really terrible and people can't add. For your information, the Medicare portion which is 2.9% is no longer subject to a ceiling and is levied on the last dollar of income. They passed that several years ago along with letting self employed people like myself deduct half of the SE tax. I deduct the half that an employer would usually pay and would ordinarily not be subject to tax in the case of an employee. Aside from that, driving the SS 12.3% portion to the last dollar of income would simply drive more of my clients to switch over to corporate form where they can limit their SS payments by taking most of their income in dividend form because it would make the extra accounting trouble far more profitable. This is what you apologists who want to transfer even more income from rich to poor never get, you simply employ more accountants and lawyers and wind up with lower overall tax receipts. If anyone should be pissing and moaning about SS it should be me considering I've been paying both halves as long as I've been working. It's the biggest payment I make. But I do know where that payment goes, a good friend of mine writes Medicaid policy and another works at SS resolving disability claims (a large portion goes to the lawyers who file the claims). Last time I was in the ER the person taking my insurance card told me I was the only one there with insurance and the place was packed with Medicaid patients (they didn't look like rich people). The benefits that the poor receive are far in excess of what they will ever pay in. The rich and middle class will pay in far more than they will ever receive back. You want to skew that even further?