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The total income, including all government transfer payments, of the bottom 20% of American families is about $300 billion. Even if they had a 100% tax placed on them, they couldn't even cover the half the actual federal defecit.
You seem to have a fetish about SS. Doesn't Rupert Murdoch let you write about anything else?
Apparently Mr. Dionne's "core liberal principle" is massive wealth transfers from one person to another, as much as possible, without regard to whether it's regressive or not. Actually, it is just blind defense of New Deal programs, regardless of worth. The mushy center-left (like indeed much of the center) tends to be generally ignorant or at least unanimated by a particular philosophy.
Whether private accounts will help the poor or not depends on many things and is far from certain. What is certain is that Wall Street and the wealthy who currently hold stocks will profit immensely from this scam.
Here is the current breakdown(in quintiles) of family income in America:
I-- $345 billion
II- $762 billion
III-$1205 billion
IV--$1738 billion
V---$4223 billion
Even if the total income of the botttom 60% of American families was taxed at 100%, the revenue would not cover the federal budget.
No amount of smoke and mirrors generated by conservative shills like Will can change income distribution in America...
Giving the poor a few looted private accounts while getting rid of the estate tax on the wealthiest 1% of Americans won't change anything either.
Characterizing SS as insurance is not, in itself, proof that it is a good thing. Not all insurance is good. But it does render irrelevant the very attacks Will then makes on it. Insurance is not intended to be charity. It is not intended to redistribute income. Insurance (or good insurance) is justified because it is efficient, not because it is redistributive.
Characterizing Social Security contributions as a "tax" is begging the question. If Social Security is a scheme of social insurance, then contributions aren't taxes, they are premiums. We don't worry about whether premiums are regressive. If you want to join in the fight to make the overall tax system more progressive, Will, that would be great. But that's not what Social Security is for.
Your claims about a mandatory defined contribution scheme are just claims. Anyway, implementing such a scheme now does absolutely nothing to deal with the actuarial liabilities of the existing scheme. That can only be done by raising contributions or reducing benefits. But you can raise contributions or reduce benefits without creating a mandatory defined contribution scheme. If you ignore the existing liabilities, of course your defined contribution scheme will pay a better "rate of return." If I designed a new defined benefit scheme, which just ignored the liabilities of the old scheme, then it would look great too.
The very first generation of retirees maybe got a good deal, but the current retirees don't take advantage of future generations. That's just a canard.
Now, as a matter of legal fact, the social security payroll tax is a tax. The Supreme Court ruled that SS was constitutional because it uses, on the one hand, congressional taxing power, and, on the other, spending power under the rubric of promoting the "general welfare." There is simply no dispute whether or not thhe SS payroll tax is a tax. The question is whether a tax plus a set of non-guaranteed intergenerational transfers counts as insurance in any strict sense. The answer is that it does not. I admit that it is insurance in the loose sense, but then so is everything else, and the regular criteria about progressivity etc. kick in.
The first generation got a phenomenal deal. But there is simply NO WAY that the current cohort of workers is going to get the same ratio of benefits to tax dollar as the current cohort of retirees. THAT IS WHY EVERYBODY IS FIGHTING. Taxes will go up, future benefits will go down, or both. And that is the sound of current workers getting screwed.
I don't know the solution to helping out America's poor, but it sure ain't the scam you're pushing...
Seriously, Will, hasn't he overstayed his welcome yet? I've actually stopped bothering to read a lot of your comments threads because I'm sick and tired of having to scroll past his brain-dead non sequiturs and slanders. He's already proved he's not interested in debate; why don't you start deleting his posts?
Social Security provides one third of retirees with their sole source of income and another third with their main source of income.
Any poll you choose to look at shows only a small minority of Americans want Congress to alter SS.
Not even the right-wingers hide the fact that the push to change SS is funded almost entirely by Wall Street firms.
As posted above, the lowest quintile of Americans have a combined annual income of $345 billion. They also have no net worth.
The highest quintile of American families have a combined annual income of over $4 trillion and about $50 trillion in assets.
The problem is that the federal budget continues to grow and those who can afford to pay for this increase have been let off the hook. We are in debt $8 trillion and growing. The push to "reform" SS is just a smokescreen to draw attention from the crippling effects of Bush's massive 2003 tax cut.
When Will offers up anything other than lines from Carl Rove's talking points, I'll be glad to counter it...
Will might be wrong about all of this, but please address his arguments and show why he is wrong instead of attacking him as a hack.
Snark aside, two points:
(1) Pointing out that many people who're taxed heavily with the promise of a future benefit then fail to save and rely on the future benefit proves exactly nothing about how they'd behave in the absence of that program.
(2) Since retirees are often living largely off accumulated assets, focusing on income makes sense only if you're being intentionally deceptive or obtuse. I'll assume the former in the case of those who promulgate those figures, but in monkyboy's case, I think the latter is probably more tenable.
"Of course, there can be no certainty about this."
Political Liberalism, p. 68.
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Please give us all, the full heaven on earth!
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