[geoschmo]

Originally posted by rextorres:
So when you talk about how much revenue comes into the govt all taxes it turns out the top 20% are now paying less - look it up. And please don't show just income tax it's all money that comes out of a paycheck.

I plan on it. It's a lot of figures to read over and it may take me a while. But I will post what I find.

Before I get into it too much we need to establish something up front. While I agree that it's not fair to ignore the payroll tax when looking at the total tax picture, I don't think it's accurate to add the entire payroll tax in when determining what share of the tax burden each of us shoulders. So we need to discuss this a bit if our debate will have any common ground.

I think we can all agree the ideal situation would be for each persons SSI/Medicare taxes to be used to pay for SSI/Medicare expenses of that person. However, realistically it can't. It's designed to be a social insurance plan where everybody pays in and everybody gets back out. The closest we could get is for each years payroll tax revenues to be used to pay that years SSI/Medicare expenses. It would be nice if there was no surplus or deficit, but that isn't realistic either. It would be ok if any surplus were saved to be used for future years deficits, (In a lock box maybe? ) but that doesn't happen either. Instead the surplus is converted bonds which the government uses to fund other programs. This is I believe the area that bothers you and leads you to calling the whole thing a tax.

So, I think if we are going to consider SSI/Medicare payments as taxes, we should break that up and call the portion going to pay SSI/Medicare expenses as "insurance premiums" and the portion that goes towards these other programs as the hidden "payroll tax".

If that seems reasonable to you I can look at the numbers and figure out what portion of the total tax revenue for each year is paid by which income demographic. Actually I will calculate it both ways, just for curiosity.

EDIT: Now mind you I don't think it will matter that much as far as I believe going in that the numbers will show the top 20% of wage earners pay a significant portion of the taxes whichever way I calculate it. But obviously it will change the degree somewhat.

[ September 18, 2003, 21:56: Message edited by: geoschmo ]