Forum Post: Payroll Tax Break Perfidy
Posted 4 years ago on March 11, 2020, 11:21 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
On 3/10/20 Trump suggested a "Payroll Tax" break to help workers to pay for COVID-19 detection and treatment. Is undermining SS and our long term well being the way we want to deal with this temporary problem?
The Social Security Trust Fund depends on the "Payroll Tax." Borrowed and spent, the repayment must be voted by Congress each year. So, though we've paid in advance for our SS insurance, Congress and the president can refuse to pay by simply refusing to repay what they've borrowed. It shouldn't be a budget item. SS was set up with its own tax and trust fund so it would be independent and untouchable. But conservatives from all 3 parties have found the borrow and spend workaround.
So far, the cons haven't carried through on the threat to the retirement security of 90% of American employees. But they never miss an opportunity to take another shot as Social Security. Since employers match the employee contribution to the tax, the "business community" generally supports attempts to steal the trust fund permanently and so destroy Social Security.
Was This A Prescient Post?
respice; adspice; prospice!
Who do the landlords think they'll rent to, when 29 million families are evicted because they can't pay rent. When Blackstone and the rest of the parasites buy up the foreclosures, including the landlords', who will buy or rent them with 40 million homeless families who can't even afford to eat?
FYI: "The Unravelling of America" by Wade Davis:
multum in parvo?!
So the plan is to subsidize it. Building a monstrosity in the middle of our downtown towering stories all luxury. ($2000) a month. This as families are about to be evicted and struggling to find jobs. Generally I agree with safety nets - however - in this case landlords are taking advantage of section 8 which covers a huge chunk of that "market rate rent". This is a common trend to see these kinds of prices especially in the inner city - I've seen as high as $3000.00 and they do fill them with low income families. Corporations are using these subsidies as a cash cow. So this is obviously unsustainable. Corporations and landlords aren't paying in. The working class can't uphold it. Obviously we need more jobs and higher paying jobs - but they aren't happening and this government refuses to tax corporations. What we do need is rent control. Most of these buildings are built with tax breaks and grants to begin with. We also need to get landlords out of the "Housing" by charging them and flippers commercial tax rates because they have turned housing into a venture capital gain. Ending capital gains breaks would also help. After these landlords and developers buy up all the available single family homes with cash - they play on the fact that our city is in desperate need of housing to beg for grants to build these towering infernos which often catch fire especially the 3 families most of which are owned by absentee landlords sometimes located overseas. The failure to connect that they are the cause of the lack of available housing and pour in the money and subsidies boggles the mind. But yet it's rampant. We continue to feed the sharks so they grow bigger and bigger and we wonder why there is such a wealth gap and one percent pyramid. In our case you can take a drive and see the grandiose mansions they are building for themselves in nearby towns (they would never live here because it's too polluted, crowded, noisy, ugly, and rundown). They lie to the public through our city paper which is owned by a development firm and tell everyone how the city will be beautified, somehow, by overpopulating our city and leaving the expenses and tax burden of that on our struggling working class shoulders. Our infrastructure (roads, gas lines, water, schools) wasn't built to hold it. So of course all of that comes next and happens almost right away - regular families see their tax bills, and other bills shoot through the roof. Meanwhile the builder got a moratorium and doesn't have to pay tax to the city. They would NEVER build this stuff in their own posh towns. They specifically come to places like our lower income communities and claim to the politicians how lovely and gentrified it will become if they will just give them free reign. They rezone the entire city. Squish in housing wherever they can squeeze it not to mention businesses. Then they have the nerve to turn around and claim that it's our responsibility as citizens to fix this housing crisis (the one they caused).
Unfortunately I was fighting it, and now somehow it's racist to oppose it. They are using the black lives matter movement to steal from the public coffers and keep poor people reliant on the taxes of the struggling and decreasing working class. This is about to implode. It is unsustainable. I can't even think on what's going to happen - because corporations very much want to lay off their staffs and subcontract. The middle class hasn't had a raise in 30 years. They can't pay for it, people are going to end up homeless. This is a disgrace. Landlords don't worry about buildings that sit empty - it's a new way to tax shelter money - so they will evict on principle alone. The elderly especially can't afford to have their costs rise. What happens is they cut them a break. So a few working families are left paying for the whole developer shebang. All of this is based on quarterly Money NOW! nothing is planned for sustainability and it's the poor, working poor and working class who will suffer despite that we are the ones struggling and sacrificing to keep it going.
The conservative corruption of human life never sleeps.
so maybe because I haven't yet fully looked into this - is this the employer portion or the employee (both?). My thought here is that right now because corporations get so many breaks and loopholes and employees get none - as well as right now only essential workers are left paying this tab and working is it not fair to offer them the same breaks others are getting to stay home and safe especially since they are not receiving hazard pay? My thinking is that we MUST tax corporations and stop all the loopholes. My other point is we leave out passive income privilege's and things like capital gains breaks landlords receive. We must also have rent control coupled with commercial tax rates on landlords.
Generally speaking, direct government control of something leads to unnecessary shortages of goods. Rent control is cumbersome and breeds corruption. The classic capitalistic model for imposing indirect government control is for the government to provide a public alternative, maybe not fancy but good enough for many.
Yeah, I've come to realize "the conservative wisdom" of the public alternatives presented to my Mom. There were two surgeries which the public doctors recommended against doing them on me. Decades later, I can see that they have been correct about the unnecessary surgeries. Mom ended up having only one done on me: removing my prepuce to "cure" my bedwetting ( gosh, there was no causality linkage from circumcision to no bedwetting; how idiotic the American Empire's influence was ! I suppose that Jewish boys who are circumcised for religion never bedwet, right? Couldn't somebody have taken a survey to find out? It's not like the U.S. only had "Nordic Aryans" and didn't have Jews who might well tell the truth ! ) If I had stopped sleeping 11 hours straight through, I probably wouldn't bedwet, right? Older children sleep fewer hours through the night than younger children do and I was growing older. As for the other surgery, I outgrew the big lymph nodes { tonsils including adenoids } near my throat. Yep, children often grow bigger and sometimes lymph nodes don't grow as much or the enlarged ones due to infections shrink as the infections subside. Since the public doctors saw many children, they argued for the immunity benefits of leaving the tonsils alone because they probably knew the time dimension of children's changes { most things in a child's head get bigger but the tonsils get smaller during childhood growth } better than the pay-for-service private hospital ( it simply did what was asked for and made the money.)
I don't see the U.S.S.R. standard housing projects for example as being too bad for its time. It's the irresponsive and unskillful management which had caused many problems ( the housing occupants also bear the responsibility of being reasonable users { any user with idiotic self-centeredness or malice can clog up the shared cloaca with a handful of peach kernels and blame the management for the sewerage overflow on Christmas Eve; in the U.S., business schools churn out many such psychopaths and sociopaths to become "captains of industries" to install an upstream pig farm which produces effluent to nourish a guava tree } and amenable to education and coordination; as sabotage from the inside is both easy and potentially very destructive { beware of what Maoism/Xiism is doing; note how the WHO had been hacked to destroy much of the World, even worse than a number of nuclear bombs exploding; thus in damage assessment, a nuclear war to cure the infection is both just and proportionate,} I have the same expectations for all immigrants to follow.) Responsiveness and skills are organizational human-resource/toolset problems, not inherent in the housing projects. The U.S.S.R. had much land and yet many people didn't need or own a car because of the housing projects' having most of what they needed within ten minutes' of walking. I do find the lack of elevators in U.S.S.R. housing projects' buildings cringe-worthy but they had been built long before even the U.S. tackled the problem head-on. I like what the U.S. has done for the handicapped people ( and the not-usually-considered-as-being-handicapped people such as women with baby in baby strollers, pregnant women, elderly infirm, people carrying much stuff, etc.) I wonder whether retrofitting external elevators can provide power-assisted access to different levels of U.S.S.R. housing projects' buildings as well as separated entrances to units in order to reduce common hallways which promote disease spread. "Don't expand services beyond what can be maintained for the long term." Trillions of dollars of aid to Africa for example built up things the locals couldn't maintain therefore much of the aid was wasted { in shoring up the short-term prestige of and buying "votes" for the corrupt dictatorships; it's unlikely that any dictator facing an election would have come to my Mom's "First Flush" ceremony held in our bathroom for our white porcelain "people's throne,"} There's a certain sequence for building up sustainable and useful infrastructure. Let us start with potable water.
People congregate where hot or warm moisture is forced to reach for the coldness of outer space. A tall mountain range close to an ocean or sea suffices: China, India, Indochina have the Himalayas close to the Indian Ocean; California has the Sierra Nevada close to the Pacific Ocean; Kenya and Tanzania have Kilimanjaro close to the Indian Ocean; Peru has the Andes close to the Pacific Ocean; northern Italy has the Alps close to the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea; etc. Note that many of these have glaciers atop the mountains functioning as high-up natural water tanks which release water from the ice in the warmer seasons.
If the glaciers disappear due to global anthropogenic climate change, these water tanks will disappear making many peoples' lives unlivable so there will be massive migrations or centuries of wars to fight for the scarce resources derived from sunlight ( deserts have much sunlight but little freshwater ) and freshwater ( oceans have much water but little freshwater. However, put a tall enough mountain in between and let the winds blow the hot or warm moisture up the mountain to reach for the coldness of outerspace and we get freshwater, a vital ingredient for human form of life--genetic engineering to insert genes of brackish water plants such as mangrove or ocean fishes may remove the "fresh" restriction so that widely available salty water substitutes for freshwater. ) Saltwater fishes can live with seawater so they must have ways to cope with salinity which we don't. Even the fishes and their predators are no exceptions to the rule that they proliferate where there is much mixing of warm water with icy cold water welling up ( e.g. Peru and Newfoundland.) Ocean warming halting arctic and antarctic cold currents can starve the fishes and their predators.
China's population rise to great numbers came from its breakthrough discoveries of "applying" water-buffalo dung ( traditional-Chinese organic tractor's exhaust ) and legumes' ( clovers, peanuts, soybeans, lentils, etc. ) planting and their being plowed/ploughed under before they flower to be used as organic fertilizers. It's as if our combine-harvester tractor-trailers spew fertilizer to boost the growth of self-growing organic fertilizer plants which take in nitrogen/Stickstoff(suffocating substance) from the air to make nitrogenous fertilizer. Chinese water-buffalo-dung/bean-plant pies were sold as fertilizer before chemical fertilizers became widely available from industrial-scale nitrogen fixation using the Haber process.
Poorer or remote places without much access to superior-concentration industrial fertilizers may be able to go on the same Chinese route from which many mammals also benefited to achieve their massive gains after the dinosaurs' mass extinction ( here's the plan for how to survive a nuclear winter { I'll eat the mushrooms grown from cadavers--the British of the fame, "Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman; Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread," used to grind up the human bones from the graveyards of Sicily to fertilize their fields to feed their burgeoning population fueled by the industrialization via coal usage; it's why the British conquered so much of the World with their excess boys; it's the same cause which had driven Imperial Japan to rape East Asia and now Redfuckgina pooling blood to Clintoris to fuck up West American Warm Lake; population pressure leads to war because "life is electric fire burning slowly in water" and this fire seeks constantly to start more fires as well as keep itself burning; wars/Kriege are just for getting/kriegen for the fire of life } which may be unleashed by the U.S. and China soon ! )
Physics says that one must travel close to the rim of a blackhole and escape in order to travel to the future in a giant leap. If one's unsucessful, one's effort will be immortalized in an ever slower, redder, and darker motion picture to be displayed at the blackhole's event horizon. "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away," -- Douglas MacArthur.
The Koreans implored, "Don't scuttle the Pacific." ( Or we'll have to fight the Reds on our own wide-open thousand-mile homeland shores of California, Oregon, and Washington state. )
Redfuckgina wants to impose a single-party dictatorship. I agree that our Trumpanzian party suffices. 1,400,000,000 Chinese under the command of the Chinese Communist Party ( Communism's emphasis on class struggle instead of cooperation makes it an inherently inferior "rob thy neighbor" instead of "help thy neighbor" ideology ) must obtain what is their right--"Arctic Club" Xiismship via the Manifest-Destiny reconquest of Siberia all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Sieg Heil !
shit for brains repugnicunts have choosen to be Tory traitors to America and freedom for all every chance they've had since 1868.