Digby has a good summary of the forecasts on Social Security from way back when, and makes a couple of good points.
This is one I hadn't thought of:
As fewer and fewer people command more and more of the income, the amount subject to the payroll tax shrinks. Which, for any logical thinker, leads to a very simple solution:
In other words, raise the cap on payroll taxes.
David Atkins has an observation that I think is germane, embedded in a post about the deficit queens/anti-Obamacare militants, but I think offering an insight into the psychology of the whole camp:
Of course, for these jerks, everything is a moral issue. It's a real shame they have no moral foundation themselves. They sort of typify what I think Pope Francis meant by this:
Because scratch a teabagger and you'll uncover a "Christian."
This is one I hadn't thought of:
Current projections show that we might have a shortfall in a couple of decades. That is not because they failed to plan properly. It's because something unexpected happened in our economy:
The SS payroll tax currently applies only to income below $110,100 a year, while any dollar an individual makes over that amount is not subject to the tax. So the growth in inequality since the late 1970s has pushed ever more income out of the reach of the payroll tax. When the formula for setting the cap was reformed in 1983, only 10 percent of earnings in the country escaped the tax. By 2008, that had grown to 16 percent...
As fewer and fewer people command more and more of the income, the amount subject to the payroll tax shrinks. Which, for any logical thinker, leads to a very simple solution:
The rest of that [shortfall] could easily be made up by raising the amount the high earners pay in beyond what it would have been.
In other words, raise the cap on payroll taxes.
David Atkins has an observation that I think is germane, embedded in a post about the deficit queens/anti-Obamacare militants, but I think offering an insight into the psychology of the whole camp:
It works because most of the deficit fetishists never actually cared about the deficit, per se. The deficit is just a symbol to them of a moral laxitude about a culture of dependency that can only be fixed by slashing social spending and forcing people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. It's a social, moralistic fetish, not a regretted position based on actuarial review.
Obamacare makes real people's lives a little easier, and makes insurance company CEO's lives a little bit harder. The deficit fetishists don't actually care whether it saves the country money. Morally, it feels wrong to them that the poor aren't suffering more. It never was about the deficit in the first place.
Of course, for these jerks, everything is a moral issue. It's a real shame they have no moral foundation themselves. They sort of typify what I think Pope Francis meant by this:
At last Thursday’s mass, the Pope said that “when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”
“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Pope Francis I said. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”
Because scratch a teabagger and you'll uncover a "Christian."
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