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Step 1. Abolish the debt limit
Deficit hawks hold the debt limit hostage and say they won’t raise it unless government spending is cut. For this reason alone, the debt limit has got to go.
Step 2. Close our infrastructure deficit
Our infrastructure is in dire need of repair and over ten million Americans are in dire need of work. Government spending to both make safe our dangerous infrastructure and reduce unemployment is the height of fiscal responsibility.
Step 3. Abolish the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax
As James Galbraith has written, “Social Security and Medicare … cannot go bankrupt, and they cannot fail to meet their obligations unless Congress decides … to cut the benefits they provide.”
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Can you tell us something about FICA?
What do you want to know??
It’s a payroll tax that has half paid by the employer and half paid by the employee through withholding that is IIRC 15.3% (7.65% each) of which most is for social security and the rest is for medicare. Once wages reaches a certain level for the year (currently somewhere between $100,000 and $110,000 IIRC) then the tax on the social security portion ends while the tax on the medicare portion continues.
Something tells me this isn’t what you were asking though. lol
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/money101/lesson18/index4.htm
By the way, in one nice little change from Obamacare (yeah, there were a couple of good things in there, but overall a bad deal nonetheless that we’d be better off if there had been no healch care bill passed) the rich will now contribute more to Medicare.
It’s somewhere around the 200 or 250 K threshhold, but all wages above that will pay a little more in medicare taxes. Which is a good thing, IMO, since it makes the medicare tax slightly progressive, although the social security tax is entirely regressive.
You’d do better to abolish real property property taxes.
The affect of property taxes on real property is to convert “ownership” into a “tenancy”, with government the landlord.
Ah, yes, President Obama said he wants to end the exemption for the rich … in 2019.
Step 2 alone would end this depression, but since working class people would benefit, fugit about it.
The FICA tax is extremely regressive and it takes about one trillion dollars from the American people every year. James Galbraith has described it as an “accounting farce”. Entitlements could still exist without it, so there is no reason to have it.