Hey Gab, you pay my taxes for me for <i>just one year</i> (this year would be fine) and I'll happily answer all your "questions" about taxes forever after. In the meantime, though, I have no use for "insights" on taxation from someone who never writes checks to the IRS... You're a boy among men in this discussion.
The problem really is people really don't understand the system. They just assume the government is going to take care of them but they're flat wrong. If the government can't even balance its budget, how is it going to take the time to figure out my retirement medical situation? Its every man for himself gentlemen.
So you require payment to be forthcoming in trying to justify your earlier condescending remark to Covertibility? Well, aren't you special.
I'm not sure what your apple & orange fruit salad has to do with my post, but thanks for quoting it anyway.
Thanks for admitting that you're incapable of engaging in a serious (or even half-serious) debate. It's really hard to deal with all those issues and that complicated stuff, right? In Barakistan, the minions want to stick with soundbites and believe fairy tales about green energy and how taxing the rich solves all the word's problems. No wonder you go straight to ad hominem attacks when you're cornered and exposed. The emperor truly has no clothes, nor do the village idiots.
You are right. If the figures are correct, $355k is much less than they should be gettting. Formula is, IIRC, P*(((1+i/12)^(n*12))/(i/12)) for monthly payments where P = monthly payment, n = number of years, and i is annual interest rate. At median annual US wage income for a full-time worker of about $39k and Medicare contribution (both employee and employer) of 2.9% (total contribution over 45 years of $51k), $355k works out to a little over 6%. At a total contribution of $115k, obviously the implied interest rate is much lower. And the $355k is not paid out all at once at the recipient's 65th birthday. Net forward value is much lower, depending on life expectancy. Medicare contributors are not subsidised. Economically, they subsidise the rest of the budget.
Very interesting. Thank you for that. So not only Social Security, but medicare also is being used to finance war! It seems that both Social Security and Medicare should be taken off budget, as Social Security used to be. What I mean by that is that we should not be able to include Social Security or Medicare contributions on the revenue side of the general budget. I realize Social Security can't, by law be spent directly for other things -- the Trust fund has to be borrowed from -- but is there no medicare trust fund, and are we just using funds collected for medicare to incinerate people in foreign lands, so to speak? It seems than that the solution for medicare is much simpler than I realized. Take it off budget, put all the contributions in a Trust fund and allow 30% or so of the fund to be invested in sovereign bonds world-wide, so that limits the amount available for borrowing by the treasury so it is a less useful piggy bank. If you did this with Social Security as well, them it seems interest rates would have to rise to prevent horrible inflation, and there might be no alternative to drastic cuts in military expenditures. We would still have the problem of medical costs rising much faster than the general inflation rate however. But there is a solution for that also, and that is to break the power of the medical cartel, by deregulation and opening up medicine to competition. r In the final analysis it seems there is no reasonable alternative to greatly reducing military expenditures.
I understand that your adding all manner of unrelated variables and other non sequiturs into the mix makes you feel much smarter and more worldly, but it only shows your lack of focus to the specific point being addressed. Go put some clothes on.
Thank you for the excellent elaboration. The staggered payout did not even occur to me at the time I wrote my earlier post.
So on the general of topic of taxes, state/local/property/sin/excise/hidden taxes are all "unrelated variables." Can anyone really be that dense? I understand your childishness forces you to have the last word and do "I know you are but what am I" responses when you're cornered like a journeyman boxer being pummelled by the HW champ. But please know that you're doing nothing but flaunting your stupidity even more with these attempted retorts. But that's all for now. The fool has been answered according to his folly and he gets even more foolish. / thread.