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Aug 10, 2020

What Would You Prefer?

      The President announced that he would defer collection of the F.I.C.A. tax that supports Social Security between September and December of this year.  Note that the President only announced that the tax would be deferred. It would all still be due in January. It is not within a President’s power to cancel it. In fact, it’s not really within his power to defer it. 

     The employee’s part of that tax is 7.65% of gross payroll. If the President’s plan goes forward, employees will find themselves owing 30.6% of their gross paycheck in payroll taxes in January in addition to income tax withholding.

     So, let me ask you. Would you rather pay your F.I.C.A. month by month or would you rather have no F.I.C.A. tax for three months followed by a large balloon payment that eats up a huge portion of your salary, after the election, in January?

     And it's not just employees who may find this tax deferral of questionable utility. The vice president for government affairs of ADP says that deferring the F.I.C.A. tax requires "a little bit of a leap of faith on an employer’s part." You may well ask who is ADP? It's a corporation. They process payroll for 40 million workers and 800,000 businesses. If ADP doesn't defer F.I.C.A., there probably will be little deferring of F.I.C.A.

13 comments:

  1. Personally? I'd rather it effectively be taken out of my tax refund in January. That would simplify matters, and I could use the excess earnings during the course of the year for an IRA, savings, etc.

    Structurally? This is a horrible idea. Plenty of people don't get refunds and wouldn't be able to adjust to the change. And structurally, the trust funds benefit from the interest-free loan workers/employers effectively give them. Although personally, I'd like to get some of the benefit of that interest, the system requires it.

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  2. Personally, I would prefer for the democrats get off their a$$es and come to the bargaining table in good faith, instead of playing games and holding the public hostage over their Marxist wishlist.

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    1. Explain the points you are making.stop generalizing

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  3. @1:43 PM

    Probably wasting my time here, but can you point to anything in the democrats' proposal that was "Marxist" and articulate why it is "Marxist?"

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  4. 143 it is the Democrats who compromised from 3T down to 2T. Republicans just took their marbles and went home. What is Marxist about trying to make the lives of down and out Americans better after Richie Rich screwed up the pandemic response.

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  5. 2:41 We don't have the money for Trump's EOs, let alone the 3T more the Dems want to spend.

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  6. This is simply a ploy by Trump to buy votes. I will suspend payroll taxes. If re-elected you won't have to repay the taxes but if Biden is elected you will, so vote for me. But he may not really have the unilateral authority to do that so it's just another con.

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  7. Didn't Trump indicate that he wanted to permanently cut the payroll tax and that he would if re-elected? That's basically saying he wants to kill Social Security and Medicare since the payroll tax funds them. Trump has by that promise officially declared himself to be the anti-Social Security and Medicare candidate. Vote for him if you want all of your Social Security and Medicare taxes paid over the years to be for nothing. Vote against him if you want to save Social Security and Medicare.

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  8. 306 until and unless we go back on the gold standard, we have plenty of money. It will cost us more in the long run if we don't throw money at the problem now. A balanced budget is so last century.

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  9. SSA needs every penny. We will only be able to pay 79% of what people are owed in not so many years. Any plan to defer what is owed is terrible. We actually need to be raising tax rates, 'adjusting' benefits, and finding new sources of revenue. This will affect the paychecks of attorneys/reps doing SSA cases in the not to distant future.

    Less than 1/2 of Americans wait till 66 to retire, so why do we pay the disabled the 66 yr old rate? We can't afford it anymore. And we pay extra for dependents and there is no offset for veteran's benefits so that group makes out comparatively well. And the VA unemployability standard is a joke. Nothing lie SSAs.

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  10. A short term boost of a few bucks a week only for people that haven't lost their jobs that then must be repaid because he doesn't have the authority to cancel it. Sounds like the kind of dumb idea an idiot thats been bankrupt multiple times would come up with.

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  11. Leave social security and Medicare alone we should be putting a trillion dollars into these programs to secure the present and future well being of our people.

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  12. @3:06 PM

    I think the more accurate statement is that we don't have the political will. There's plenty of money to pay for everything Trump and the democrats want, and then some. Heck, our outstanding national debt is barely higher than our annual GDP. No rational person would tell an individual or family pulling in $200,000/year that they can't afford to service a $240,000 mortgage (not that government's should even be held to the same standards as individual borrowers), and individuals don't have 1% of the credit-worthiness and stability of an economic superpower.

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