{"id":196359,"date":"2008-05-03T11:43:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-03T16:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/03\/george-f-will-is-an-idiot\/"},"modified":"2008-05-03T11:43:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-03T16:43:00","slug":"george-f-will-is-an-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/03\/george-f-will-is-an-idiot\/","title":{"rendered":"George F. Will Is an Idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Will, writing on Obama&#8217;s proposal to lift the earnings cap on wages, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/id\/134316\/page\/2\">talks about the middle class folk who will be hurt<\/a>, and gives the following example: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You favor eliminating the cap on earnings subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax, which now covers only the first $102,000. A Chicago police officer married to a Chicago public-school teacher, each with 20 years on the job, have a household income of $147,501, so you would take another $5,642 from them. Are they undertaxed? Are they rich?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Dude, the $102K limit is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">per individual<\/span>.  Their tax load does not change, they are both taxed on their total earnings.<\/p>\n<p>Truth be told, I don&#8217;t think that there is a problem with Social Security, but there <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">is<\/span> one with Medicare, so here is my suggestion about how to fix that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>End the cap on employers&#8217; part of the Social Security tax, and devote the additional revenue to Medicare and Medicaid.<\/li>\n<li>Broaden the definition of earnings to include things like the sweetheart deals that senior executives get.<\/li>\n<li>Tax the employee&#8217;s part of income at levels above $1 million.<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>This would mean that there is a &#8220;notch&#8221; between $102K and $1M.  You can call it the Paris Hilton tax.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It would go a long way toward fixing the problem, and it is a much easier political sell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will, writing on Obama&#8217;s proposal to lift the earnings cap on wages, talks about the middle class folk who will be hurt, and gives the following example: You favor eliminating the cap on earnings subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax, which now covers only the first $102,000. A Chicago police officer married to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1009,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}