Here’s something that our kneepad press doesn’t seem to want to tell the working public, most of whom don’t make enough to encounter the phenomenon themselves. If you are fortunate enough to make more than $90,000 per year, you don’t pay any Social Security (FICA) tax on anything over that ninety grand. You pay 7.65 percent on the $90K, and zero after that.
In other words, if you make $90,000, and some CEO has a base salary of $10 million, you and that CEO pay the same amount of Social Security taxes. If you make less, then you are actually being even more royally screwed, because that 7.65 percent in FICA taxes are taken out of every single dollar you make, while $9,910,000 of that CEO’s income are exempt.
Why is there a cap like this on FICA taxes? Well, do you see any poor people in Congress or the Senate? Any folks working at Wal-mart got lobbyists trying to remove that cap on taxable income?
I find it simply outrageous that the Bushits call such a cap removal a “tax increase.” If you are so fortunate as to make a half million or many millions of dollars in this country, the idea that some poor schmuck at minimum wage pays a vastly larger portion of that income to Social Security than you should be shameful.
And, of course, raising the cap would go a long, long way to fixing the solvency problem that Bush falsely characterizes as a “crisis.” Of course, he’s a fucking liar and a con man of simply unimaginable ruthlessness, and his legendary fixation on winning at all costs will provide a formidable challenge even to those Republicans who are realizing that Bush’s plan is DOA and want to get past it quickly. It will be fascinating to watch the creative ways Karl Rove attempts to punish the turncoats to El Presidente’s demented vision.
I can already hear the right-wingers screaming, "That's the politics of class warfare."
Fuckin' A. That's exactly what it is. Time for working people to be fighting back. We cannot let BushCo destroy the last protection left to working folks.
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