Smasharoo wrote:
You do understand that payroll taxes are already flat
Aside from that part where I pay <1% of my income and most people pay 6%, yeah, they're perfectly flat.
Aside from that part where I pay <1% of my income and most people pay 6%, yeah, they're perfectly flat.
Which was the "(more or less)" part that you stripped out of the sentence when quoting me. It's flat up to a specific income level. You don't pay 1% payroll tax. You pay the same 6% that everyone else does on the first ~$100k of your income. And you know darn well that the reason for this is because of the vestment system. Once you've paid X dollars into the system, you are considered "fully vested" in the program and now qualify for full benefits. Any dollars beyond that is dollars paid to cover for other people who don't fully vest into the system. Anyone hitting that income cap has likely been fully vested for years, so 100% of the money they pay in at that point is money that goes to pay for other people's benefits, not theirs. Complaining that we don't take more money from them while giving them nothing in return is a bit strange.
This is why I said I'd have no problem with a flat tax with no income cap *if* benefits were not capped as well. Since they cap benefits based on dollars put into the system, it's completely fair to cap dollars taxed (it's actually still unfair to those paying more money after fully vested really). If you want to remove that cap on the tax, you need to remove the cap on the benefits. This obviously applies more to social security than medicare, but that's at least a starting point on making the benefits more proportional to the contribution.
Quote:
What we should do, really is just tax people on the first 200k and after that just call the rest "winner's spoils". Why punish success?
Again, different taxes for different things. Apples and oranges.