Busy last couple of days, just wanted to add, fuck YOU Mitt Romney I pay a higher tax rate than you

[DainBramaged]

asshole. And I'm poor. What you spend on dinner would feed me for a month. What you spend on that fucking horse your wife thinks is her right would keep me in medicine for five years.


Fuck you Mitt Romney, tax dodging fuck who doesn't represent the 99% of us who don't have capital gains income,


fuck YOU.

[unblock]

1. most people pay more in fica alone (15.3% combined) than rmoney does in federal income taxes.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

3. I doubt that most people are self employed

And the self-employed are the only ones that pay both halves of FICA.

[unblock]

6. from an economist's perspective, both halves are a tax on labor; it doesn't matter who gets the bill

if the government decided to stick the entire 15.3% on the employer, or on the employee, in theory the market would simply adjust wages and salaries to compensate.

economically, there's really no difference between money they deduct from my paycheck and money they pay on top of my paycheck.

yes, there's a difference as far as accounting goes, but economically it's all the same thing.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

7. They're the same only if you assume

That if the employer didn't have to pay his half of the tax, it would give it to the employee. Some might, but the majority wouldn't.

The self employed truly pay the entire burden - the rest of us? Maybe we do, but most likely, we don't.

[unblock]

8. no, the price in the absence of the tax has nothing to do with it.

let's say there's a tax on widgets and the market price is that buyer pays $100, seller gets $90, and government gets $10.

it could be written up as:
(a) the "price" is $100, and the seller pays the government $10 and keeps $90.
(b) the "price" is $90, and the buyer pays $10 to the government (collected by the seller but forwarded to the government).
(c) the "price" is $95, the buyer pays $5 to the government (collected by the seller but forwarded to the government) and the seller also ponies up $5 more to the government.

it's all the same thing. any difference is illusory. at the end of the day, the buyer paid $100, the seller gets $90, and the government gets $10.

in the absence of the tax, the market price might be anywhere between $90 and $100, but that has NOTHING to do with whether the tax was in the form of (a), (b), or (c).

the same is true of income tax or sales tax or any other tax. my salary might well change depending on the tax code. if the income tax is abolished all employers might well decide that they can cut salaries and effectively take half (or more!) of the benefit of the tax cut. that doesn't mean that the employer "pays" income taxes, any more or less than they "pay" fica taxes.

economically, the statement that i pay all my income taxes (and my employer doesn't) is exactly the same as saying i pay all 15.3% of my fica taxes (and my employer doesn't).

arguably, a more economically valid way of putting it would be to acknowledge that ALL taxes are to some extent shared by both parties in any taxed transaction. so even though *i* pay sales taxes and *i* pay income taxes, the burden is shared with my grocer and my employer, just as it is with fica. how the burden is split, though, depends on the shape of the supply and demand curves, not on any official allocation (0%, 100%, or 50%, e.g.).

in practice, though, we always say *i* paid my income taxes and *i* paid my sales taxes. fica is no different. *i* pay all of it, even the part that doesn't show up on my paycheck because the employer pays it directly to the government. it accrued as a direct function of my labor earnings and my employer wouldn't have to pay it otherwise.

would it really change anything if they nominally gave you a few extra bucks on your paycheck and then immediately deducted the exact same amount?

[SickOfTheOnePct]

9. Free country and you can believe what you choose to believe

I'm only paying the full FICA tax if a) it was paid to me and then deducted or b) if it would definitely have been mine, but the employer just pays it directly instead of paying me so that I can pay.

[Marie Marie]

2. Well you are obviously just jealous of his success.

I'll go with most Americans on this. We may have a lot less material wealth but we have a lot more heart. All his money and people can't stomach him.

[porphyrian]

4. . n/t

[Freddie]

5. If you took all the taxes people pay

FICA, Medicare, State, Local, Unemployment (most states), Sales Tax, Gas Tax, Property Tax, taxes on utilities, cigarettes, liquor, etc....ALL taxes...and calculated who spent more on ALL taxes as a % of total income--including dividends, capital gains and such that poor people don't get--I'm quite sure it's lower and middle income folks who pay a higher % of their income in total taxes than the rich. Because they spend a higher proportion of their income on necessities that are taxed like utilities and gas.
Is there a study about this somewhere?