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The size and scope of both government and it's programs.
Being one of the last or first to pull out of the Depression is no indicator of the New Deal or the effectiveness per se of govt. reform. Slow improvements are still improvements and Depressions tend to be quite slow to recover from almost no matter what a govt. or Central Bank does. Also comparing countries economies tends to be apples to oranges affair, they're often quite different making comparisons difficult.
Which govt. programs? SS or what? And to what degree exactly and how are they, if you mean other programs, "insolvent"?
Are you being serious? So if somebody who earns $120k a year, they pay $14.88k a year into social security. If somebody earns $25 million, they pay... $14.88k a year into social security. How is that an equal percentage as the poor again?
I wouldn't say your rates are insult to injury, more like right where they should be. If you're having difficulty not having anything left over, that speaks more to the lifestyle you're accustomed to rather than how far that kind of money can take you. Your combined income puts you in the top 10% of the USA, and right on the border between upper middle class v. lower upper class (depending on what system is used to measure it). However you almost certainly ARE probably paying a higher percentage in taxes than people far, far richer than you, since once you start approaching the stratosphere, you can hire accountants to pull every tax trick for you, put money in offshore accounts that government can't find out about, lobby congressman to get laws changed favoring you or your business, etc. In an ideal situation, people wealthier than you would be paying at LEAST as much as you are, not less.
you dont even need to do that. Just live on a farm and you can deduct out of the ass. The F form is a gold mine
Where did I say they didn't? Google or read up on the Taxable Earnings Base. Increasing the Taxable Earnings Base has nothing to do with increasing the rate.
Which is the way its supposed, as you note its meant to be a progressive system, to be but ignores my point: less of the rich people's total income is taxed even if the rate stays the same. That is how it is regressive. The total amount of money a billionaire will pay into SS is the same as someone how is "merely" a millionaire or who is right at the limit of the Taxable Earnings Base since only the 1st $118K of income is taxed for SS.
i dont see an issue but the last part...thats how it was specificly designed to not rob the rick entirely blind. Again, it would be better if the terrible program was just removed....but i am being wishful of course.
How would it rob the rich blind? All other taxes aren't subject to a Taxable Earnings Base that only taxes the first ~$118K of income and the rich are still plenty rich. In fact they're richer than ever in just about all of US history.
How is it terrible and how could things be possibly better with it gone? Bear in mind prior to SS it was normal for the old to generally die in extreme poverty on the street. Mutual Aid Societies, the only other option available at the time, tended to fail to help people who paid in to them and often went bust during Recessions and almost totally collapsed during the Great Depression. They were also prone to fraud and ponzi schemes that would make Wall St. blush today.
Except the smallest possible govt. approach has been a complete failure all throughout history. Not just the history of the world but also in the US where it was tried multiple times. Yes there is plenty of waste in govt but guess what? There is plenty of waste in private industry too. Quite a bit of fraud as well. And accountability is a joke everywhere you go. I've seen plenty of VIP's and middle managers play pass the buck in private industry and corporations to the detriment of the company as a whole or to the employees. Neither govt. nor private industry are perfect and each have their strengths and weaknesses.
Neither govt. nor private business is efficient on a large scale, that is a human problem not a organizational one, and neither are inherently benevolent. There have been bad govt. and bad businesses. Govt. doesn't have the profit motive though and so when it does tend to fail on a operational level its usually due to incompetence rather than greed (which often leads to fraud in private industry) which is easier to sort out and fix.
Wildcat (read: private) banks and private tax collectors used to exist you know. They're gone and relegated to the dustbin of history because as bad as Central Banks and the IRS are they're still better than any of the private solutions were.
Conflicts of interest happen all the time in private industry what are you talking about? They're also pretty piss poor at regulating themselves or even following regulations due to the profit motive.
No, they did that because the law was written the 1930's with 1930's wages and wealth in mind. It just needs to be updated but good luck getting that through the current Congress. And it was always meant to be a welfare program and it was expected that people would live longer to use more of it in time too.
Are you goal post shifting to talking about charity now? Charity has never been able to meet the needs of the poor ever in the history of the world and it can't do it now either. So your trust is misplaced and founded not in fact but, at best, ideology. Also trying to get the 40hr work week or even SS passed took what amounted to a "damn miracle". Just because its hard doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.
I don't know what you're referring to here.
I didn't take you out of context at all. While I also didn't provide you with the example you were asking for I gave you some historical ones that are factual examples of private industry failing horribly where govt. has succeeded if only sloppily at that.
This has been said throughout history. The cotten gin, industrial era and so on. What will happen is new sectors will be made and new jobs will be filled. Look at whole agriculture was 90% of the market but now its mostly manufacturing and service. You'll see that more and more service jobs will exist. Cleaning, massages, pleasure/leasuire, and so on will become more common. It just means new types of jobs will be made but some displacement will happen and some time will be needed for the market to adjust.
For the rich, HENRY's, and the (now small) middle class. Just because the market for goods shrinks doesn't mean the jobs would or could come back. Most of the poor and unemployed would end up like those that live in favelas in 3rd world countries essentially.
They don't have to be a cure all for manufacturing to end up replacing most labor, just cheaper than most labor.
There are also plenty of modern societies where the few rich have nearly all the wealth and everyone else lives in grinding poverty. Again 3rd world countries are what I'd look to. Historically under Feudalism and various empires it was normal for almost everyone but the rich to be dirt poor or a slave. Not saying I like or want it that way but it could really happen unfortunately.
Robots will be able to do nearly all those jobs cheaper or better than humans though too. The future will not be exactly like the past since in the past such advanced machinery and software didn't exist to do such tasks. In the future, a very near future at that, it will.
That is a goal post shift from "Cleaning, massages, pleasure/leasuire, and so on". They don't have to do everything a human's hands can do, just most of it to replace most jobs. I've also never talked about a fully automated society or work place. Neither did the article in the 1st post.
In 1930's when the law was written sure and under 1930's wages and 1930's degrees of wealth the concept made sense. It doesn't today because things, in this case wage stagnation + massive wealth inequality, change. There is nothing ridiculous about this and the paper I linked a ways back in thread goes over all this stuff in detail.
All govt's prior to the 1700s have been smaller than any US one but plenty of atrocities, genocides, wars, and massive amounts of stupidity have occurred due to them. Being small doesn't mean they can't cause or enable massive abuses at all. Look at the slave trade from a historical perspective. Or look at people like Genghis Khan. Look at the Tulip Bubble or the Crusades. You have to be blind to history to believe the things you're saying.
The discussion had nothing to do with charities, you were saying SS was terrible and didn't explain how. You just dropped that part of the discussion and then started hinting at charities as a replacement to SS with no information to support your view. So yes that is goal post shifting. The freedom to starve or die in the streets isn't much of a freedom at all. And it was one that society already decided they didn't want anyways when it was put to a vote. That you might want that "freedom" is irrelevant. The US and society doesn't do what you or I want. Productivity is the highest its ever been in US history BTW so you're going to have to provide some seriously high quality evidence to prove welfare makes people lazy too. Just remember we're supposed to be talking about SS while you do it in your reply.
SS, the IRS, and Central Banks are all success of govt. and no none are cherry picking or "revisioning". They all also came about due to market failures and/or failures of private enterprise to meet the needs of people and/or govt.
Govt. is policed by voters and officials they elect though, its facetious of you to claim otherwise. People do occasionally vote for the wrong people who do terrible things (ie. Hitler, Bush, etc.) but that is a whole other problem that private enterprise cannot address. Its hard to change any large organization, whether its private or govt., due to social inertia, buck passing, self centered or out of touch leadership, etc. All those problems also happen in private industry and have caused major private companies to collapse in the past. Private organization also does routinely use deadly force to protect its existence and achieve its goals via mercenaries or by paying for coups. Its so common that the name "Banana Republic" has often been given to various Central American countries as a result of United Fruit's successful efforts to have its interests enforced when the local populace wanted to redistribute some wealth. Another great historical example would be the Dutch East India company's efforts with the slave trade.
Modern PMC's would meet all if not all your criteria here. They're notorious for getting away with murder and worse.
PMC's do this too. Blackwater has changed itself into Xe and then Academi and now Constellis and has done all this stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least with the CIA most of the torturers were made to leave the organization and there was public outcry about what went down that helped to get Bush's cronies booted out over time too. Not saying that is ideal or just, it isn't, but its clearly better than what has done down with the PMC's.
Which is fine, no one has a problem with that per se, though it must be mentioned that means testing would help keep SS self funding for longer here, and that wouldn't effect the ability of SS to continue to operate.
This would be negligible at absolute worst since the SS tax is on wages only. The rich don't actually earn much money through wages. Most of their money is in stocks and bonds which are subject to the capital gains tax instead. The Capital Gains Tax BTW is lower than the highest wage tax bracket at 20% for people who earn more than $400K/yr. The highest wage tax bracket for 2015 is 39.6% for single earners with a income of $413K or higher. Do be aware that isn't the effective tax rate though which is often much lower than that due to deductions and other exemptions.
About the same as it is right now. Reminder: employers let wages stagnate since the late 70's in the US. They're not really giving raises out now or just about ever really so your third point here is moot and quite frankly a bit out of touch with the reality people have to deal with right now in the work place.
There have but there is no evidence to suggest that the US's tax rates are anywhere near too high. Or that raising or eliminating the SS Taxable Earnings Base will cause any problems to the economy at large.
The thing you have to understand though is that the poor now are generally poorer than they were back then in terms of income and that the rich are FAR richer than they were back then. This is why wealth inequality is talked about so much.
You'd have to crank the taxes up on the only people who'd have nearly all the money at that point to make it work: the rich.
If you believe this then you must also, by default, believe that all forms of insurance (private or otherwise) are invalid too.
The 'rich' are often just living off investments side-step FICA completely The ones who are employed don't pay in an absolute sense, anything more than someone making $100,000. So its a regresssive tax on the rich, when they do pay it.
True but this is due to an unforeseeable wealth inequality gap that no one predicted would occur.
None of that works in the real world though because people in general are terrible at investing and routinely do dumb things with their money since they're not rational.
I didn't say the military budget itself was a problem, I said they might have to cut it to fund SS. And yes pumping nearly $300 Billion would make a big difference to SS. That is a 30%+ increase in funding going forward for SS. We'd also still be spending more than most if not all the other militaries in the world at that point.
1984 was about a Totalitarian state with Socialist trappings not about Socialism or Communism per se. If you actually read Orwell's comments about govt. he believed the actual system of govt. didn't much matter and that 1984 could just as easily be applied to the US or Capitalistic Republic of sorts too.
that is niave....absolute power with no checks like communism is systematically more likely to become corrupt....history shows this. I really cant tell if your totally oblivious or intellectually dishonest.
They spend "only" about $150 Billion of their budget on people though. Quite a bit of it is being blown on hardware and stupid pork barrel projects. Cutting the military budget in half wouldn't have to effect the amount of people they employ unless the military wanted it to.