Actually, as just about any accountant will tell you, Social Security can be corrected with relatively minor adjustments which don't cause the much pain. The real morass is Medicare and it's because of spiraling health costs...
Bernie Sanders
- Thread starter Bazza
- Start date
Let's see how those democratic socialist nations do without a benevolent superpower US letting them not have to worry about defense.
The cost - in money, lost time, perversed incentives, etc. - created by government bureaucracies is massive. I see it daily. The program I'm on - creating a streamlined payroll/accounting system is a joke. Instead of rolling up existing "silo" systems, we've just ended up creating another system. It happens every time. This program was supposed to take five years and about two hundred million dollars. We are in year 11, have spent nearly a billion dollars, and we are looking to do another five year contract to finish/fix our half-created program. The daily decisions made are mindboggling, to put it nicely. We pay some of our contractors more than $300/hr, and they don't have to produce anything other than the promise that they are almost ready to produce something. We have a couple of subprograms that have achieved nothing in four years. Nothing. That's government.
You really want the government controlling health care any more than it already does?
You really want the government controlling health care any more than it already does?
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The problem I have with SS is that it provides a negative return on investment. If the individual got a market return on the 40 or so years they pay into the system, almost everyone could retire very comfortably. The way SS is constructed now it deprives people of hundreds of thousands of dollars of wealth. If this was an investment option offered in the marketplace no one would buy it.
We've all seen what a fantastic job the government does with the postal service and the DMV; imagine how good they'd be with 1/7 of the US economy.
The morass I generally refer to with Social Security is not so much the IOU based "retirement plan" (although I have my concerns there too), but as someone put it: "the new American dream of getting on disability". Too many people want too much, and systems are getting overloaded. I agree with you that Medicare is a much bigger problem. If Sanders gets his way I can see Medicare and Medicaid getting rolled in to one big single payer system where a sizable group of our population (citizen and non-citizen) don't pay at all. I doubt he gets his way easily.
Last night he said he was in favor of eliminating a salary cap for seniors on SS.
I didn't know he wanted a cap on other incomes...interesting....how does that work exactly?
Does anyone remember the pictures of Bush a few years after Obama took office saying 'miss me yet'? If Bernie Sanders were actually capable of passing his whole agenda through congress I have no doubt we would be seeing pictures of Obama in 4 years.
He has advocated an income tax of 90% on income exceeding $1M. So, using a simplistic example, if someone earned $101,000,000 during a tax year and there is no tax on the first $1M (which is not the case with Bernie's plan), the individual would pay 90% of the $100M (or a total of $90M) to the federal government and would keep a total of $11M ($10M of the $100M + $1M) for himself. Technically speaking, there is no cap, but it certainly would feel like one for all intents and purposes.
It's very American Bazza. During the Eisenhower years the marginal tax rate was 90%. As late as 1979 it was 70%. You know, back in the good ole days when income equality was not as great as today. Back then income over $200,000 was taxed at 90%. Would be $2.5 million in today's dollars.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/11/16/3722465/sanders-90-percent-tax-rate-debate/
While Republicans areoftenfond of saying that lower tax rates spur economic growth, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Historically, post-war growth has beenhigher when the top marginal tax rates were higher and lower when they were substantially lower. Under Eisenhower and with a more than 90 percent rate, economic growth averaged more than 4 percent a year. With a rate closer to 35 percent in recent history, it’s averaged less than 2 percent a year
Correlation is not causation, of course, but the economy has tended to do the best when taxes on unearned income were high. dividends were taxed at very high levelEconomic growth was great during the 1950s, when dividends were taxed at very high levels and capital gains rates were 25 percent, much higher than they are now. Since 2003, tax rates on unearned income have been at their lowest levels ever, and economic growth has been sluggish.
Tax rates are not the reason for that, at least not directly. But it could be argued that low tax receipts now are having a pernicious impact, particularly on state and local governments. Their layoffs have been a drag on the recovery, and the declining quality of infrastructure in many areas has hurt many businesses. If the federal government taxed unearned income anywhere close to historical averages, there could have been a lot more tax money available to help out when the credit crisis hit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/business/investment-income-hasnt-always-had-tax-advantages.html?_r=0
That's a different issue from what he was talking about, although he's talking about that also. If you earn more than $118,500, you pay no social security or self employment taxes on any earnings over that figure. So, a person earning $50,000 per year ends up paying a much larger percentage of his total earnings than someone making a million. That is what's known as a "regressive tax." He's proposing removing the $118,500 cap (which is adjusted upwards each year for inflation) so that a person making a million is paying the same percentage of his earnings as someone earning below the $118,500...
But of course that million dollar earner would not then receive a commensurate SS income in return for the enormous amount of additional tax paid in, which is why the current salary cap is logical and should remain in place.
And of course when added to the 90% marginal income tax, we now get to a 96% tax on all income in excess of $1M, and when the Medicare tax is added, it rises to almost 98%.
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True. The max benefit now is a little over $2600 a month. A spouse can draw the same amount, if she were a max contributor also. Most of us don't really ever draw out an amount equal to what we contributed...
A dramatized conversation between a libertarian and a statist (cough, seebell, cough) on taxation:
Statist: Uncle Sam can't pay his bills. We need to give him more money.
Libertarian: Uncle Sam brings in ca-jillions in revenue, but he spends his money on drugs, alcohol, hookers, gambling, and the rest of the money he just wastes. He can't pay his bills? It's not for lack of funds; he's just stupid with his money. Giving him more will just make the waste greater. We shouldn't enable this bad behavior. I wouldn't do this to a dog or a child. Why should I encourage bad behavior in an adult? Why should I give my hard earned money to a moron?
Statist: Uncle Sam needs more money to pay his bills.
Libertarian: Is my microphone on?
Statist: Uncle Sam can't pay his bills. We need to give him more money.
Libertarian: Uncle Sam brings in ca-jillions in revenue, but he spends his money on drugs, alcohol, hookers, gambling, and the rest of the money he just wastes. He can't pay his bills? It's not for lack of funds; he's just stupid with his money. Giving him more will just make the waste greater. We shouldn't enable this bad behavior. I wouldn't do this to a dog or a child. Why should I encourage bad behavior in an adult? Why should I give my hard earned money to a moron?
Statist: Uncle Sam needs more money to pay his bills.
Libertarian: Is my microphone on?
For sure...my comment was aimed at the capped nature of the monthly income benefit.
To those of you wanting to rake insurance companies over the coals, I work in the industry and if you could see what I do every day and what people claim on injuries you'd have a much better perspective as to why insurance companies charge what they do.
Not only the above but if you could see what hospitals/doctors do to pad the bills.......
Not only the above but if you could see what hospitals/doctors do to pad the bills.......
He seems to have realized the error of his ways with respect to public relations, but at least we know how he really feels regardless of what top marginal rate he might publish today.
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