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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (27699)	6/6/1999 12:44:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

There is no legal connection between paying FICA taxes and receiving Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance benefits. True, the tax records of the SSA are used in calculating benefits, but if you prove that you did work covered by SS even though you paid no taxes (by old payroll stubs, for instance) your benefits will be increased. I am now engaged with dickering with the SSA to receive credit for employment for which I paid no FICA taxes. FICA taxes are almost like any other tax. Pay and forget. I said nothing about this being unfair. Fairness is a term that should never be used in discussing the U.S. tax system. I suggest, and have suggested officially in the past that capital be required to pay FICA taxes, especially human capital. This would force capital to seek high enough gross returns to pay the government 7 per cent a year and still grow in amount. This was only part of my tax reform package (Reaganites vetoed me on the Treasury Tax Reform Committee, worse luck.) A more fun proposal would have zeroed taxes on savings and investments. The basic principle of Social Security since 1951 reforms has been redistributive (Republican Congress, you know) to take the same proportion of earnings in taxes and pay benefits in approximate declining proportion to the average earnings of people (more or less -- tricky multipart benefit formulas). The impossible problem of meeting both "individual equity" and "social adequacy" concerns requires at least a two-part public retirement program. When I represented the Labor Department for a few meetings of the President's Committee on Private Pension Plans in 1962 I urged that we follow the European experiments in equity investments for the part that would guarantee individual equity and should be fully funded. I was, of course, laughed to scorn by the Democrats on that committee.