Why is there a payroll tax?!?! because poor people pay it

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

My position on taxes is that they should be used less as a source of income for government programs and more as a behavior modifier. For example, a tax on gasoline would cause people to consume less gasoline (it wouldnt, but thats the theory).

lots of lying republican douchebags say that they want to cut taxes in order to create jobs. if they give lots of tax breaks to wealthy oil companies that have plenty of money and companies that specifically ship jobs overseas, then that will allegedly cause more people to be hired in america, which is good for everyone.

while dubya may have said “by far, the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom end of the spectrum” what he actually meant is that about 20% of his first tax cut goes to them, and most of it goes to wealthy corporations that donated to his campaign.

most importantly, he did NOT cut the payroll tax, which i believe is the stupidest government policy that ever existed besides the holocaust. the payroll tax only applies to people who make less than $90k a year, which is a little above median income, but its capped for no apparent reason other than favoring the wealthy.

the worst part about this tax and the most amazing thing given the fact that all tax cuts that go to businesses claim to be intended to create jobs, is that [b]its a tax ON JOBS[/b]. the more employees you hire, the more payroll taxes you are forced to pay. the way behavior is being directly modified by this tax is less people will be hired in order to avoid the tax expense. any other tax cut will be only indirectly related to hiring, as the freed up money can be spent on anything in addition to more employees. cutting the payroll tax will directly affect employment, massively.

WHY THE HELL does this thing exist!!! and how the hell can any politician claim to be attempting to create jobs while not immediately destroying this amazingly retarded tax???

the most confusing part of this tax is that i believe it was FDR that created it, or somebody who i dont totally hate and was not hell bent on destroying poor people like neoconservatives or medieval fuedal lords are.

my question is what reason could there possibly be for creating this horrible abomination and how can it possibly continue to exist once a politician claims that he wants to create jobs? who does this tax benefit?! why do taxes exist that specifically modify behavior in a way that is bad!?

shouldnt all taxes and subsidies be simple little nudges helping the free market behave in a way that avoids negative externalities? is it that hard to realize that the payroll tax is causing fewer employees to be hired? what is good about this tax?

2

The whole idea of tax is rediculus…

3

no it isnt.

do you like highways? how about defending jews from nazis? or funding massive research programs that are not profitable enough in the short run to induce private firms to embark on? and once you have established a uniform tax rate on businesses (one that is not actually large enough to cause people to not want to start a business, which is pretty large), you can then give tax cuts in specific places to cause specific behaviors. like tax cuts for building jobs in ghettoes, or higher taxes for building high profit, completely worthless luxuries for rich idiots.

or you can put a tax on employees so that every new employee a company hires causes that company to have to pay more taxes, this way, all companies will hire fewer employees. and you can also just randomly shoot people in the face and collect the Random facial shooting taxes out of their wallet.

i propose that we abolish both of these taxes so that less people will be randomly shot in the face and more people will be hired.

taxes are great, as long as the people making them are either not retarded or not pure evil and motivated in the slightest bit by campaign donations or money of any kind. the laffer effect (more taxes equals less willingness to produce) is not real on any reasonable scale and definetely does not take into account the fact that no private investor creates a highway for his own selfish profit.

who created the payroll tax and why and why is it not yet abolished if politicians claim they want to create jobs?

i say it hasnt been abolished because it is a tax that if cut, will mainly affect only poor and middle class people (those who make less than $90k a year). those poor people do not pay campaign contributions to politicians and therefore politicians could care less if they are dead, and they simply use the excuse of job creation to reward their campaign contributors, not to create jobs. what other reason could there possibly be?

4

eliminate payroll tax, income tax, death tax…

but if you really want to piss people off, eliminate withholding tax…

make the people write a check for taxes immediately after being paid…

you earned $500, here you go…

who are you? I’m the liberal tax man. you need to pay this tax, that tax, child tax, poor bastard tax, world peace for wombats tax, rights for vegetables tax, tax for the sake of tax PLUS an additional 23% tax because you voted for liberal idiots who know how to run your life for you.
(no spam tax this week, but we’ll hit you twice next week)

that will be $428.54 in tax.

what? you only get paid $71.46 for a full 40 hour work week?!? how terrible!! well, we’ll give you an additional $40 worth of food stamps if you live in our government housing…

fuck that.

[size=200]VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!![/size]

-Imp

5

no there is a death tax because people decided that an aristocracy of corporate wealth is a bad thing and children of extremely wealthy productive people might spend that money in stupider and more harmful ways than even the government. liberal crazies like bill gates and warren buffet signed a petition to keep that thing in place. there is a reason why it exists.

income tax exists so we can build highways and kill nazis. those things wouldnt happen without “stealing” money for the good of society.

what is the withholding tax? a tax on savings? if so, hell yes thats great. savings is bad for the economy, you need to spend it on pointless consumption like jewelry, food and charity.

guess what, im a famous mathatologist and my studies indicate that taxing you a lot causes you to work more because you still need the same amount of money, but since we stole most of it, you need to contribute even more productivity to our great nation. raise taxes! horay!

anyway, my question is “why does the payroll tax exist?” not “what do anarachists think about taxes in general?” i already know the role that taxes play in anarchy, its the same role as law and order.

6

Have you answered your own question?

Why is there a payroll tax?!?!

Because poor people pay it.

Due to the poor persons inactivity in politics, he is forced to pay. Most people complain but don’t actually do anything.

7

free thinker, that just seems way to easy. it seems way way too obvious and a violent revolt too remote a possibility for this to be the truth.

ive found myself saying this more and more often lately: i find it easier to believe that i am currently babbling incoherently in the corner of a padded room and all of this is an illusion than that this is all actually true.

where did the payroll tax come from? cause i think it was FDR, in which case it probably was not specifically intended to destroy poor people. i can imagine the reason why it remains in place is because nobody cares about poor people. but the only reason why i can think of creating this is because somebody actually cared about destroying them. which is weird, usually nobody cares about them one way or the other.

8

I can answer that. Yes, it was the Roosevelt administration. And Social Security was paid for that way out of political necessity.

The ideal way to pay for Social Security is through progressive taxation such as the income tax. But if that was done, FDR feared a future Congress might be able to eliminate Social Security, which would then be a form of welfare. By framing the program as an entitlement instead of welfare, and having it so that what a retiree got out of it depended on what they put in over their working life, FDR set things up so that it was politically very, very hard to reverse the legislation. Anyone calling for that is advocating robbing old people of their own money.

He was without a doubt the greatest American politician of the 20th century. He did make some mistakes (the “court packing” scheme was a hummer), but a lot of what he did was pure genius – from a political standpoint. Which often meant that it was less than ideal in terms of social engineering.

The real problem at this point with the payroll tax is that the government has gotten into the habit of borrowing funds from the Social Security trust fund to cover general expenses. This amounts to a transfer of tax burden from the income tax to the payroll tax, President Reagan’s nasty bait-and-switch. The Reagan administration, overall, actually raised taxes for most taxpayers, by lowering income taxes but raising payroll taxes to partially compensate.

The only way that payroll taxes can be even remotely fair, is to lock the Social Security trust fund so that those moneys can’t be borrowed for general government spending purposes. If the government needs more money, it must raise progressive taxes, not that regressive one.

9

thank you very much navigator. i knew it was created for something good.

and i should have known the cheney/rumsfeld Damn Dubya Empire had something to do with it being ruined! boy youve made me so angry. oh my god i want them all assassinated so badly man i cant even tell you how hard it is to maintain my composure in this computer lab in my school ive corrected about twenty typos.

omg! somebody kill them already!