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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (13234)	3/21/2012 1:14:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

1) Yes it does. No it doesn't. SS spends more than the SS tax brings in. That's a deficit not a surplus. Do you or do you not agree that your check has a specific deduction for SS? Do you or do you not agree that your check has NO deduction specified for defense? Both true, also both pretty meaningless. Taxes are taxes and spending is spending. A tax and a spending category with the same name doesn't mean much. If the law was changed there could be a deduction specified for defense but it wouldn't mean that defense was "paid for" and no worry and we don't have to restrain the budget growth. Defense is very expensive. One of the largest categories of government spending. Its the same thing for Social Security. Also you could have the spending without the tax, or the tax without the spending. Do you want SS to end? It should probably have not been started in its present form, but many millions of people have built their lives around it, you can't reasonably just end it. If SS is blended into other taxes as you claim; what do you think the end game here will be? I didn't say it should be blended, or that it is. I pointed out that the fact that there is a specific tax for it doesn't matter much. We could have all sorts of specific taxes for every major category of spending, and then claim several of them are "in surplus", but the only surplus or deficit that really matters is for the government as a whole. SS is the only program paid for by all the people. That's a factor of how the tax is applied, not the fact that its "the social security tax". You could have the whole government funded by payroll taxes (which I don't recommend for several reasons, but its a possibility), or you could switch things up and have SS funded by an income tax, while having defense, farm price supports, the state department etc. funded by a payroll tax (again I'm not recommending it, even if I'm not quite as against it as the first idea). The structure of each particular tax is a totally different issue than what we have been talking about. I'm simply making the point that having a tax with the same name as a spending program, and then arguing the biggest category of spending isn't driving the budget because the tax with the same name was until recently bringing in more money than the program spent (and even now is bringing in almost as much) is silly. Every dollar of spending drives the deficit by one dollar (or looked at another way by about 30 to 45 cents since we borrow about 40% of spending currently, $1, or 30 to 45 cents, depends on whether you consider the spending as an isolated incremental thing which gets you $1, or in the context of the whole budget, treating all spending equally, which gets you 30 to 45 cents.)