The more I think about the president’s plan to make payroll taxes permanent and pay for Social Security, Medicare and other disability and insurance programs with the general fund, the more I think the president might be a secret Democrat.
Follow me here.
If we’re SO against having taxpayers pay for everyone’s healthcare because Universal Healthcare is socialism, then we should also be against having taxpayers pay for everyone’s Social Security, Medicare, disability and insurance programs too, shouldn’t we – because that is also socialism.
The general fund IS taxpayer money – so the president’s plan to pay for Social Security, Medicare, etc. with the general fund? It’s a debt to the public.
That is EXACTLY what democrats have been trying to do with healthcare, except it’s WAY more.
Democrats only wanted general healthcare. The president’s plan will add to the taxpayer burden Social Security, Medicare, disability, and other retirement and insurance programs that the payroll tax covers.
The president is giving democrats a HUGE win as I see it.
I don’t think the president thought this one all the way through. Up front it sounds like a nice plan – we’ll defer payroll taxes until the end of the year, put money back into the employee’s pockets, etc. etc.
It’s a nice pitch, but if you really think a few moves ahead, more money in your pocket means you pay more in taxes, and you’ll still have the burden of paying for Social Security, Medicare, and the other programs because they’ll be paid for out of the general fund.
Of course, instead of paying it just for yourself when you retire, you’re paying it for everyone else too.
How is that not socialism?
What I think will happen is that this that they’ll use this as an opportunity to phase out all of those programs.
One of the most effective strategies the republican party uses to cut a program they can’t just cut without facing outrage from the public is to defund it.
The programs are still there. They just aren’t being funded. Same difference.
For decades the republican party has been to brand programs like Social Security and Medicare as entitlements so they can cut them under the banner of “cutting entitlements to reduce deficit spending” and prop up themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.
The problem is that nobody was buying it. These programs are paid for with payroll taxes, which means that they don’t add to the deficit or to the national debt, and people were paying for them directly, with matching funds.
That’s not an entitlement. It’s a savings and investment.
This makes it pretty dicey territory when the programs get cut, and/or when Congress spends from it, because neither are supposed to happen; and if they do spend from it, they should pay it back.
What the president’s plan will do is make Social Security, Medicare and other programs that payrolls taxes currently pay for entitlements, by shifting the burden of costs to the taxpayers.
Those programs will then be counted as deficit spending and add to the national debt. What they’re doing is making those programs “entitlements”, and “the party of fiscal responsibility” will, I think, use that to defund those programs.
Of course, are they doing to refund the money that hard-working Americans have paid into those programs their entire working lives? I highly doubt that.
On of my friends, a Trump supporter, says the president has this and will figure it out, but right now I can’t help but think that this was the plan all along.
The deficit is out of control, and the crackdown on immigration has cost the government untold millions of dollars, because one of the things about the programs payroll taxes cover is that immigrants pay into these programs and they’ll never be able to collect because you have to be a citizen.
There is a surplus of money, or should have been, but Congress couldn’t keep putting their hands into the piggy bank.
That’s YOUR money they’re spending…
Listen to the Mnuchin explain on the Fox News Sunday interview.
As I said… I can help but think this was the plan all along.
What do you think?