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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fiscally Conservative who wrote (53577)	2/12/2006 4:04:15 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Everyone pays the same rate I pay, but like you they just don't realize it. They are using your faulty logic in thinking that someone other than them pays the half they don't see. So,in the past 25 years the Federal government has only managed to raise the rate for the self employed by less than 3 percent of every taxable dollar. Over 25 years and only less than 3%!! Unbelievable. Because it is up against the upper limit of what individuals can and will pay. It is also up against political limits. The political party that wants to increase payments into the system (raise employment tax) don't want those payments to come from the lower paid workers because employment taxes are very regressive. They want to increase the premiums on the higher paid workers but that would require the long standing formula for maximum income subject to tax as well as the formula for payouts to be adjusted. In other words it would require changing the original SS charter. They did manage to push through Medicare to the last dollar of income in exchange for a lowering of the marginal income tax rate. Increasing the SS rate or the maximum on higher paid workers would have a negative effect on receipts. It would push higher income workers to restructure the way they were paid. It would be far more profitable for them to do what my clients do, structure their employment to an outside contract basis through a small tightly held corporation. Your views are slanted toward a privatization of the sytem. More money to chase the equity markets (stock market)the real ponzi scheme,imo. Why am I not surprised. Frankly, I just want out of the system. But beyond that, one could privatize without having the money go into the equities market. The government could give people individual accounts which contained the same thing the trust funds contain, US Treasury bonds. If you had placed that 12.4% of lifetime earnings into nothing but US Treasury bonds throughout your life, you'd have done far better than the payout the government promises and you'd own your plan, you'd have something that you could actually pass on to your dependants when you die. Right now you have no legal ownership of the trust fund, you can't enforce your right to the projected payout in any way except through your elected officials.