Bryon Daly wrote:
>
> "John D. Giorgis" wrote:
>
> > At 10:02 AM 2/22/2003 -0600 Dan Minette wrote:
> > >Bush has another double taxation he could have eliminated: taxes on the
> > >money which pays the Social Security tax. Is the fact that that mainly
> > >benefits individuals who make <75k/year and that he doesn't favor this a
> > >coincidence?
> >
> > Because it does not produce economic distortions, and because Democrats
> > would viciously oppose any tinkering with Social Security, including
> > attempts to roll the SS tax into the general tax code and to means-test
> > benefits?
>
> I didn't think Dan was implying that SS tax should be folded into the general tax
> code; just that the double taxation here should/could be fixed. All that would take
> is allowing a federal tax deduction for what is paid to SS tax, perhaps in the same
> way 401K contributions are not taxed. This shouldn't require tinkering with SS
> at all, it would only affect the federal tax.
The last I was really aware of tax law in this regard, if you were
self-employed, you had to pay both the employee *and* employer part of the
SS tax, but you got to deduct the employer half, and not as an itemized
deduction, but as an adjustment to income before you even got to the point
where you worried about itemized deductions. Companies get to deduct that
as well.
I think that it ought to be deductable, or at least it ought to be up to a
certain amount. But then again, I think the *rate* ought to be lowered and
the *ceiling* raised or eliminated entirely. (They eliminated the ceiling
on the Medicare tax already.) Except that the way benefits are calculated,
they look at how much you've contributed over your life, at least for
retirement income. But the system is going to crash before I hit age 65
anyway, unless some sort of drastic measures are taken; I favor some form of
means-testing (and yeah, I'd probably never see a cent of it then, but I'd
rather have the safety net there for the people who have been scraping by
all their lives than to pamper those who *could* cushion their nests
themselves, like, oh, say, Sammy's grandparents).
Julia
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