Crush Liberalism

Obama wants massive tax hike to pay for Social Security

The LA Times’ “Magic Negro” wants to tax those mean ol’ nasty rich folks to fund everyone else’s retirement. From ABC News:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is considering a major tax hike on the rich to shore up the nation’s Social Security system.

“If we kept the payroll tax rate exactly the same but applied it to all earnings and not just the first $97,000,” Obama wrote this week in an Iowa newspaper, “we could eliminate the entire Social Security shortfall.”

Right, because businesses would just absorb the extra taxes (i.e. revenue shortfalls) without making any changes, right? Don’t you just love these functional economic illiterates?

Anywho, here’s a typical example of economic ignorance displayed by the left and the MSM (pardon the redundancy):

Obama’s idea, which he described on the op-ed page of Friday’s Quad City Times as being “one possible option” and not a formal plan, would raise more than $1 trillion over 10 years by subjecting income of more than $97,000 to a 12.4 percent tax. Half of the tax would be paid by employees and half would be paid by employers.

OK, for those of you who actually believe your employer pays half of your Social Security taxes, here’s an economics lesson for you, free of charge (and I know how you libs like “free” stuff, so “You’re welcome” in advance):

Your employer does not pay for any smidgeon of your Social Security taxes…you do. Your employer figures out how much it will cost him/her to hire you (salary, benefits, training, AND Social Security taxes), and then acts accordingly. For example, let’s say you make $50,000 per year (gross salary). It costs your employer much more than your $50,000 salary, and your salary and future raises will be based accordingly. All your employer does is collect the taxes from you in the form of smaller-than-it-otherwise-would-be salary and raises. Even if you get a nice salary and/or a big fat raise, know that it would be even fatter if your boss didn’t have to collect taxes from you. In other words, you would be making at least 6.2% more if not for the Ponzi scheme tax (er, Social Security tax).

In other words, the “employer’s share” of the tax doesn’t come from your mean ol’ nasty corporate bosses’ coffers. It comes from your own pay check. The sooner you people get it through your head that businesses do not pay taxes but merely collect them, the better off you’ll be.

Old Soldier has a good post on this, too, including mentioning that the 51% of taxes that the top 5% of wage-earners pay obviously isn’t enough for the left. These fools cannot be trusted to manage the purse strings of our country!

September 24, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, Obama, taxes