An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Many taxes feature an exclusion or rebate for people at the bottom of the income scale. Payroll taxes are one of the very few that feature an exclusion for the wealthy, even the extremely wealthy. The more money you make the bigger your tax benefit. (This was the topic of one of the first articles I wrote when I was starting my journalism career.) In fact, if you make $30,000 a year you pay an effective 15% tax in payroll taxes, with no deductions at all – 7.5% that you pay directly out of your paycheck and 7.5% which your employer pays on your before, something which economists judge as effectively you paying it. But if you make millions of dollars a year your payroll tax rate can go down under 1%. Limiting or ditching that benefit could eliminate any longterm Social Security budget problems basically forever. Now Democrats are again pushing ditching this high income exclusion as their response to new Republicans plans for big cuts to the program.