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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Heywood40 who wrote (5657)	1/11/2017 12:48:12 AM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Recommended By TimF Respond to of 367538

>> When my wife and I earned $600K last year, and only paid SS on $118.5K of it, it became quite clear how the super-rich can easily support SS for poorer people forever, just by raising the cap when necessary. Yes, because there are just so many "super rich" out there making $600K in earned income. You have to come to understand -- and you will -- that these problems (SS, Medicare, and some other big problems) cannot be solved on the backs of the wealthy. Only 2% of the population makes over $250K. The percentage making over 600K is considerably smaller, and over a million is extremely small, even today. There simply aren't enough to even fix SS. And that still leaves a far bigger problem, Medicare, to be solved. Besides, it is huge break in the social contract. FDR assured the country that SS would never be a burden to future generations and in fact, he flatly stated that if "these programs become a burden" to future generations "they will have failed." Either way, I'm sure they're going to do it, but it is a partial fix. The real solution is privatization but liberals don't want that. You know, you always want to punish success. We often hear about "shiny objects" but removing the cap on SS is a high order shiny object. It is an apparently easy source of funds to get at. But as usual, you simply don't comprehend the downside.

To: Heywood40 who wrote (5657)	1/12/2017 2:16:14 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By i-node Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 367538

Maybe, in the absence of any other entitlements, you could raise taxes enough to cover all the social security shortfall. That would have to raise taxes to harmful levels, but you wouldn't have to raise them to the absolute limit of possible revenue so yes its possible, But you can't cover the looming entitlement crisis by raising taxes. The US has never been able to pull in enough revenue as a percentage of GDP to cover that level of spending no matter how high tax rates go.