DP the party of YES, Progressive SS reform

[dcfirefighter]

I may just be a whack-job, but I don't think so.

It seems the GOP has stirred a pot with their SS pusch ending, yet the public opinion iron is hot, and deserves to be struck.

SS isn't broken, but it's not fixed either. When all is said and done, it IS a pyramid scheme, but so is the idea of replacing it with stock market holdings.

IMO, the biggest problem with SS is the regressive payroll tax. It's not just regressive in that it it taxes low income people at a higher rate than high income people, it's regressive because it keeps people out of work.

We each work for our take-home wage. We might say we have a $10,000 a year job, but we take home no more than $9,215 after paying for SS & MC. Additionally, due to the employer's portion, it cost our employer at least $10,785 to employ us. There is a ~15% tax on what we're selling: our time and effort. That 15% tax on labor keeps millions of Americans unemployed.

We can pay for a retired-persons safety net without keeping people out of work, or raising prices, or hindering business (employers).

We can give everyone over the age of 65 $15,000 a year.

We do this charging rent for things the US gov't gives away each year: public land use rights, mineral rights, and FCC licenses.

These things are resources that APPRECIATE in value over the years, and will continue to fund SS without raising taxes on people or businesses.

Some form of taxes would have to remain to pay those who earned SS payments greater than $15,000 a year, though this amount is relatively small and would 'probably' be able to be funded by the internal debt owed to the SS fund.

[TahitiNut]

1. Social Security relies upon healthy working class economics.

It's founded on a payroll tax and suffers when working class payrolls shrink as a share of the economy. It's the epitome of plutocratic disinformation to call it a "pyramid scheme" - it's not. It's no more a pyramid scheme than any family taking care of their own elderly.

As successive generations benefit from the improved productivity, health care, education, standard of living, and freedoms won by their forbears, those benefits are shared, at least in part, by those who worked for them. My parents and grandparents didn't go to college. I did - largely as a result of their hard work and values. It's the least we can do to ensure that they live out their lives - lives dedicated to making my world better - without fear of impoverishment.

We, the current generation of working Americans, owe nothing less to those who worked to give us the economic well-being we enjoy.

And conversely.

If the seeds are not planted and the standard of living for working people not improved, then the generation failing in its husbandry will harvest the declining benefits as well.

The plantation economics of the Bushoilini Cabal has decimated the middle class and increased the impoverishment of the working class. Never before in the last 70 years has the American working class gotten a smaller share of the wealth they create.

[dcfirefighter]

2. Fine, it's not a pyramid scheme

But the idea that a payroll tax hurts employment, and therefore wages, is sound. Very Sound.

Sharing, through auctioned rents, the natural wealth currently 'owned' or otherwise granted by the United States Government improves the GINI index.

The generation failing in it's husbandry doesn't care, at least the portion of that generation who "Got Theirs". That portion is in power, and doesn't particularly care about the greater part of their generation that will need social security.