perfidy

He is right, as long as you're talking about income taxes. The total tax burden for the median income family of four is, if I remember right, about 45% when all taxes are taken into account. This is ridiculously high.

The "zero tax payer" is not paying income tax, so his tax burden is 20%. This is lower than the middle class. The whole system is fubar, as are many things the government does.

My proposal: flat tax at whatever rate will be approximately revenue neutral, with the following deductions allowed to reduce your taxable income: personal, children, and mortgage interest. Thats it. The deductions should push the lowest income earners off the tax roles, but everyone would have exactly the same simple rules to follow. All income of whatever source is subject to the flat tax. This tax would replace all federal taxes on individuals except for SS.

For SS, just change the law so that everyone contributes 10% (pretax) of their income into a 401k type program. They can choose the types of investments just like in a normal 401k/IRA plan. This money can be pulled out for three reasons: retirement, medical emergency, and (one time only) for purchasing a home. Once it's pulled out, it gets taxed under regular rules. If you saved 10% of your income - even if you put it all in treasury bonds, you'd get a lot more back at retirement than under SS, which returns at something like 1.5%, and is dropping.

The advantages are many - the return for every citizen participating in the plan is higher. They are not dependent on a government program headed for bankruptcy, or on the government, period. All that money is in the economy, rather than being wasted by the government. That nest egg is an inheritable asset - if you die, your family gets that money, all of it, rather than letting the gov't off the hook for all the money you paid in. That wealth stays with you and your family. Even someone who worked at minimum wage for their entire working life would retire with many hundreds of thousands of dollars at 5% compound interest. Finally, the government won't be faced by a financial crisis when the current system collapses.

The only issue, to me, is the question of how you manage the transition. To be fair, everyone who is already recieving SS or is very near to retirement should get the current benefits. For those further from retirement, perhaps a sliding scale where some money would go into the new plan, some into a slowly shrinking system. For the younger people - those more than twenty years from retirement - all should go into the new plan.

The "transition" is a nice idea, but the fact of the matter is that every one of your "social security" dollars, right today, is going to pay for a war in Iraq, and pay for a great deal else of what the government does. My general point is that there is _no difference_ in how the government handles this revenue, as opposed to other revenue. It is simply taxation, pure and simple. As such, we need to examine the basis for this taxation.

In my opinion we need to start a flat tax movement with the most obvious candidate, which is the social security system, currently the home of a very regressive tax.

He is NOT right, because paying only income tax doesn't exist in this universe. It may be a pleasant mental exercise to think about it, but in OUR world, we pay a lot more than income tax. To have a conversation about taxation in general and focus on only income taxes is disingenous and deceitful, because it omits the very large taxes, as a percentage of income, that are paid by the working poor and middle class in this country.

While you are correct that the government treats all of this revenue the same way - aside from the accounting tricks it uses to distinguish them on the books, the income tax is the biggest portion of what the majority of people in this country pay in taxes. It is sensible to talk of it by itself, because the political milieu is such that attempting to roll them up into one discussion is simply not possible.

Social security is currently the greatest abomination, not only because of its disproportionate effects on the lower reaches of the income curve, but because of the deception that is necessary to maintain the illusion that it is some sort of pension fund for the American people and because of the looming disaster that demographics are making it into. But the Income tax is a close second because of its nightmarish complexity, inherent unfairness, and the costs not only of paying the tax, but of compliance and figuring out (if possible) the amount to pay.

Justice as much as any other reason demands that we reform these taxes so that the law is clear, at least relatively simple, and treats all citizens the same as we are guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment. If, to achieve this goal, we transform SS into an actual pension program, and apply a flat tax in place of the current income tax - treating them separately - that's fine by me.

Without mathematically qualifying "majority of people" it just doesn't make sense to speak of income tax as the "main tax" on Americans.

We are very specifically talking about poor Americans -- let's say people who are in the 10% or 15% brackets. For them, HALF of their tax burden goes to SS.

I don't believe we can separate it. It's nice to try to do it, but without considering it you really can't see just how screwed the poor in this country really are by the way we've set up taxation.

I note that you have not responded to the specific idea of making social security a flat tax. Yes, maybe you'd like to make _everything_ a flat tax. But you're not going to get that any time soon.

Why not just social security?

What I see is wealthy people charging poor and middle class people a huge tax for "social security", then spending the money on wars in Iraq, and other general fund activity. When the bill comes due, are we going to ask Iraqis for our retirement money back?

SS already is a flat tax, more or less - 7% of wages. We need to stop it from being a tax at all, and change it into a mandatory savings program.

So it'll be a tax... just not called a tax.