Tuesday, January 24, 2017

[NJFAC] Who Is Finished Paying Their 2017 Social Security Taxes? Probably Not You.

Who Is Finished Paying Their 2017 Social Security Taxes? Probably Not You. Teresa Ghilarducci and Alex Pavlakis 1/1/17

Though 94 percent of us (about 151 million workers) will pay our Social Security tax every paycheck in 2017, a handful of the highest income Americans will stop paying before you finish reading this blog. The over $2 trillion dollars of earnings that escape Social Security tax are an accident caused by the lopsided growth of income for the lucky few (about 9.6 million) earning over $120,000 or so per year.

The tax rate for Social Security (old age survivors and disability insurance OASDI) is 6.4 percent for both the employer and employee and is paid on earnings up to a cap. In 2016, the cap was $118,500. In 2017, the cap will increase to $127,200 in 2017 based on average wage growth. For those at the upper end of the income distribution (the top 1 percent, or the 2 million people earning more than $250,000 per year and the 137,000 people earning more than $1 million per year), $127,200 is a trivial amount on which to pay Social Security tax.

....

The 202 Americans who earned more than $50 million a year finished paying less than 5 hours after the ball dropped in Times Square. Another 773 people earning between $20-$50 million a year will finish paying the tax before you finish reading this blog on January 2nd.

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We face a retirement crisis in America. We need comprehensive pension reform, but we also need to shore up and expand Social Security. The first step is to right the wrong of lopsided earnings growth and raise the earnings cap. We should also tax some financial capital to strengthen and expand Social Security. Solving the retirement crisis by shoring up pension income is the best policy idea in the New Year. Raising the cap is very little pain and all gain.

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WHY THE SYSTEM IS SHORT OF FUNDS

The boomers are not causing the system to run short of revenue in 2035. The system's actuaries anticipated baby boomers' retirement. In addition, the system is not bankrupt. Without increasing revenues, the system will generate revenue to pay 75 percent, rather than 100 percent, of promised benefits.

The main reason Social Security taxes aren't sufficient to pay full benefits is that the system did not anticipate the extreme growth of inequality in earnings and how much of wages would be diverted to pay health insurance back in 1983 when the Social Security tax was last raised by Congress and the President. The inequality of wage income is the most important reason for the short fall. Most of all, labor earnings growth since 1979 has gone to the top earners. When it comes to the pace of annual pay increases, the top 1 percent wage - the wage that escapes Social Security tax due to the cap - grew 138 percent since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90 percent grew only 15 percent. The unprecedented lopsided growth earnings are the main reason the system is in shortfall. The system can easily be made solvent if it adjusts to the reality of inequality.

Extreme earnings inequality explains the Social Security shortfall because Social Security taxes are only collected on incomes below an earnings cap. In 2016, the cap was $118,500 (which is indexed to average wage growth, not the wage growth at the top). Anyone who makes more than the cap stops contributing to Social Security as soon as they hit the earnings cap. For most of us, this does not matter. Last year, less than 6 percent of wage earners took home more than $120,000. Therefore, the vast majority of workers pay Social Security tax all year long.

June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org

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Tuesday, January 17, 2017

[NJFAC] Trump's a Keynesian?

Trump's a Keynesian? January 17, 2017

Trump's tax cuts, although hugely favoring the rich, will dribble down to the middle class and raise overall economic demand. They will be financed, mostly, by borrowing as there are not enough easy budget cuts to make up for lower tax revenues. So we will have big-time deficit spending from Republicans. That's nothing new. Reagan had the largest deficits since World War II. Bush II had some pretty big ones for a couple of years too. Congress will go along with Trump's deficits because if there's one thing they like more than balanced budgets, it's tax cuts that favor the rich. Here's a good piece on the subject by Dean Baker that appeared two months ago.

A key element in the Trump stimulus plan will be infrastructure spending and we will do a blog on that later. It's not clear that that there will be much there there. It could be mostly smoke and mirrors. You know, like the Carrier deal. Trump makes a big payoff to Company X which builds a four-mile road somewhere and Trump talks about it ad nauseaum as a great victory. Frank Stricker, NJFAC

November 17, 2016

Trumponomics: It's Not All Crazy

by Dean Baker

Photo by Ninian Reid |

It looks like we will have to get used to the idea of Donald Trump being president for the next four years. In his campaign he pushed many outlandish proposals, like banning Muslim immigrants and deporting 11 million immigrants without documentation. We will have to do whatever we can to block such flagrantly inhumane measures.

There are many other items on his campaign agenda and that of the Republican leadership that will have to be resisted, but at least one part of his agenda could actually offer real gains. Trump has proposed large infrastructure spending and also tax cuts that will hugely increase the deficit. Both offer real benefits, although with substantial risks.

The infrastructure story is straightforward. Roads and bridges in many parts of the country are badly in need of repair. This is both an economic waste, as people needlessly get caught in traffic, and a health hazard when bad roads increase the risk of accidents. Ideally, infrastructure spending would also go to repair schools and improve water systems so that we don't have more Flints with people drinking lead in their water. It would be great if some of this funding also went to mass transit and clean energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that might be expecting too much from a Trump administration.

The infrastructure spending would also create jobs. Public construction has traditionally been a source of relatively good paying jobs for men without college degrees. In recent years, the construction workforce has been disproportionately Hispanic. Spending in this area benefits a segment of the labor market that badly needs help. Of course the benefits are considerably less if projects are privatized, as Trump has suggested, and this will have to be part of the battle.

The other useful part of Trump's agenda is that he clearly does not care about budget deficits. His tax cuts could add more than $400 billion, more than 2.0 percent of GDP, to the annual deficit. These tax cuts are not a good use of money. They will overwhelmingly go to the rich who have been the main beneficiaries of economic growth over the last four decades.

In addition to not needing the money, if the point is to boost demand, giving tax breaks to the rich is the worst way to do it. If a poor or middle class person gets $1,000 from the government they are likely to spend most or all of it. But if we give another $1,000 or even $1,000,000 to Bill Gates it is unlikely to affect his consumption at all.

Even though the bulk of the Trump's proposed tax cuts do go to the rich, there are still substantial cuts for the middle class, which will provide a real boost to consumption. This boost to consumption, along with the increased demand from his infrastructure spending, will mean a large increase in demand in the economy. The result will be more jobs and a reduction in unemployment.

The strengthening of the labor market will also leave workers better situated to get pay increases. The only time in the last four decades when workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution saw sustained gains in real wages was the tight labor market of the late 1990s.

The irony in this story is that it might take a Republican president to give us a tight enough labor market for workers to get their share of the benefits of growth. This is partly due to Democrats having come to idealize the virtues of balanced budgets. Many have wrongly concluded that the prosperity of the 1990s was due to the budget surpluses of the time, which were in fact the outcome rather than the cause of strong growth. In her campaign, Clinton repeatedly promised that her spending plans would not increase the deficit.

However the bigger obstacle to larger deficits under a Democratic president is the Republican Congress. The Republicans routinely screamed bloody murder over any effort by President Obama to stimulate the economy with larger deficits. Several times they have balked at raising the debt ceiling, arguing that this routine maintenance measure was somehow a threat to our children's well-being. In fact, the burden posed by servicing the debt, at 0.8 percent of GDP, is near a post-war low.

But Congressional Republicans will no longer care about deficits with President Trump in the White House. This means that he will be able to run deficits large enough to get the economy to full employment and quite possibly beyond.

We may once again see issues with inflation and a need for higher interest rates to slow the economy. That will have some negative effects, but at least it will put an end to the long period of high unemployment and secular stagnation. This will be a good thing; it's just unfortunate that we needed a Trump administration to get there.

This column originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

[NJFAC] Progressive efforts can be successful

Democrats Denounced Sanders' Ideas as "Impossible," Now Many are Starting to Materialize

by Michael J. Sainato

....
19 states are raising the minimum wage this year, a testament to the success of activist movements protests for the fight for a $15 federal minimum wage.
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Progressive Climate Change activists managed to help push through a pro-solar amendment in Florida this past August 2016, and help deny an anti-solar amendment in November.

....On January 2, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced with Sanders a plan to provide free college tuition to New Yorkers whose families make less than $125,000 a year.....

June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org