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Plus there is no social security trust fund.. that 15% amounts to a promise to pay you social security benefits that may or may not exist in the future, in the meantime it's basically just extra income tax on top of your base income tax rate. Social security is not sustainable with declining global birth rates and ever increasing lifespans. A point will occur when our welfare systems are simply going to go bankrupt and be unsustainable.
No one wants to hear this, unfortunately. It could get really ugly.
Employers wouldn't voluntarily pay higher wages. However, the idea is if everyone had to pay for all of their own fringe benefits, they would demand higher wages to compensate.
Mysticaltyger, due to the concept of “wage differential”, USA wage rates in aggregate are based upon the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage rate.
The minimum rate has a generally inverse relationship to jobs' wage scales. Lower wage jobs are more, and higher wage jobs are less (proportional to the differences between the minimum and the job's rate) affected by the minimum rate; (i.e. lower wage jobs are more, and higher wage jobs are less affected by the minim rate).
Due to government's anti-labor laws, (particularly the Taft-Harley act), labor is more or less reduced to begging rather than to demanding anything.
However, the idea is if everyone had to pay for all of their own fringe benefits,
they would demand higher wages to compensate.
If just a majority had the personal discipline required to take on that responsibility...
to set aside the 4-6 weeks worth of income needed to cover their time off...
they would (most likely) have learned early on to be WORTH more as an employee.
But it wouldn't need to be all that much more.
An example:
At $10/hr x2080 hrs (40hx52w) ... their gross is $20,800
That $20,800 income ÷ 1840 (40hx46w) actually worked = $11.30 per hour
That comes out to 13%.
You can do that example the other way... by acting as though the $10/hr job only pays $9.
Set aside the FIRST 10% of earnings and you have $2080 for "paid" time off.
Increased skill and/or self discipline. It's not complicated.
Last edited by MrRational; 06-12-2018 at 06:12 AM..
Would employee's pay go up if payroll taxes were eliminated? No. Those funds would go to profits. For the last 15 years that's been the trend: as productivity and profitability increases, wages have been flat. Corporations are not sharing their success with employees.
I learned eons ago in econ 101 that the "employer's share" of social security contributions amounts to a bookkeeping fiction, an economic sleight of hand. Officially, the current rates are 6.2% (of income) paid by the employer, and 6.2% by the employee, for a total of 12.4%. There's also a 1.45% payment by employer and employee for Medicare.
All told, it adds up to 15.3% of every paycheck, capped currently at $128,400/yr.
The truth is that all 15.3% comes out of the employees' pockets. This is generally true of payroll taxes. The Congressional Budget Office is staffed with bunches of PhD economists who understand this. For all analysis,
I knew a guy who owned a real estate business. When I told him the entire 15.3% comes out of employees' pockets, he looked at me in disbelief. "I write those [SS] checks," he exclaimed. I bet that not one in 100 Americans understand this, even though Social Security is not far from being 100 years old.
I do not entertain the conservative delusion that burger flippers will see a higher wage if employers no longer had to pay 7.65% of wages into SS.
Big Mac prices will fall a few cents and management compensation will increase a bit before burger flippers see any of it.
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