by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, RETIREMENT, SOCIAL SECURITY, TAXES
Chris Christie recently unveiled a plan to overhaul Social Security. This is his Hail Mary to get back in the game of running for President. Though I applaud his decision to make entitlement reform a major portion of his platform, his proposal is merely another veiled tax increase on the wealthy.
There are two portions to his reform plan. The first is to raise the retirement age from 67 to 69 over a phased in length of time. That is not such a bad idea. It is the second portion, related to reducing and even eliminating entirely the ability for a taxpayer to receive Social Security, into which he has paid during his working career, that is particularly heinous.
Chris Christie’s proposal to reduce and eliminate Social Security benefits for wealthier people is just a capitulation to the Left. He advocates reducing benefits for retired persons if they earn more than $80,000 and calls for eliminating outright Social Security benefits for retirees who earn $200,000 or more a year. This is basically another massive tax increase on the wealthy disguised as entitlement reform.
For many upper income earners, their income tax rates are already over 50%, especially when local and state taxes are factored in. Yet when one calculates that income tax rate, not included in that amount is Social Security (though Social Security is a separate tax). As reference, for those who are self-employed, one pays 15.3% to Social Security, but if someone is employed, the employer pays 7.65% while the employee pays the other 7.65%. The reason why this tax is not considered in the tax rate calculation is because it is considered to be “retirement pay”, something paid into “the system”, based upon the “promise” that it will be returned as benefits at a point in the future.
But now Christie proposes to change the game in a nearly fraudulent way. Social Security taxes would still be collected from taxpayers, but for upper income earners, you won’t get your benefits back in entirety or even at all after a certain income level when you are of retirement age. That’s practically criminal. It’s raising taxes on the wealthy yet again, because the Social Security tax would still be collected over the years, but you don’t receive the promised benefits anymore past certain income levels during your retirement years. Looked at it another way, if you are successful, if you do well and are able to retire with a decent income stream, you are now punished for that success and lose the funds you faithfully paid in over the years because the government now deems you to have too much money. It is wealth confiscation to cover decades of mismanaged funds that now need massive reform to be solvent.
I think Chris Christie’s heart is in the right place, but he really hasn’t thought his plan through. It plays directly to the Left playbook on class warfare, implying that the wealthy need to “pay their fair share” by now forfeiting their Social Security funds past a certain income threshold in order to help pay for government fiduciary malfeasance. That concept is repugnant and Social Security reform needs a better plan than what Chris Christie has to offer.
by | ARTICLES, OBAMA, POLITICS, SOCIAL SECURITY, TAXES
The federal government set an all-time record for monthly tax receipts this past April. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that nearly a half-trillion dollars was received — $472 billion to be exact. April is typically a high revenue month because yearly taxes are due on April 15th, but this April was the largest tax receipt in history. It beat the last year’s April tax haul –which was the prior record– by $58 billion ($414B).
With such a large amount of revenue, spending was below tax intake — meaning the government ran a surplus, and a record one at that as well. It was a $155 billion surplus for one month. That will help reduce the overall deficit expected for the year. According to the CBO, “the government has taken in $1.89 trillion in revenue, and spent $2.18 trillion through the first seven months of the fiscal year.” The fiscal year runs October 1 – September 30.
The most interesting part of the CBO report, however, was the portion on entitlement spending:
“The biggest spending increases are in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — the big entitlement programs that are essentially on autopilot, with costs increasing as more poor, disabled and elderly people become eligible. Combined, they are up some $81 billion compared to the same time period from fiscal year 2014.”
And more:
“Social Security has risen 4 percent this year, and Medicare has risen 8 percent, after unanticipated spending increases in 2014 left the government with a big bill at the beginning of this fiscal year.
But the biggest leap has been in Medicaid, the federal-state partnership that provides health care to the poor, and which is up 22 percent, or $36 billion, over the previous year. CBO analysts said the increase was chiefly due to Obamacare, which has pushed millions of new customers into the program, drawing ever-more resources.”
This is the elephant in the room. Entitlement spending is not even “counted”, so to speak, when discussing the $18 trillion federal debt. But until we agree to start recording Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in their budgets in actuarially sound way, we will never be able to honestly and effectively deal with their fiscal crises. All of these programs needs massive reform instead of incrementally kicking the can further down the road to avoid making difficult, but necessary changes for the long haul. Until then, deficit spending will only continue to worsen and revenue taken from the taxpayer to cover the government’s spending habits.
by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, RETIREMENT
Everyone thinks they can retire at age 65. It’s an American ideal born in the last century with the rise of unions, the defined benefit plan, and generous pension systems. In reality, especially due to advances in health, medicine, and nutrition, many people have great capability to continue to work and contribute to society and themselves until 80. And they should — because they need to.
There is a crisis of affordability looming. Besides the enormously wealthy, for the most part no average person can afford to retire at 65. It is simply not possible, living a normal lifestyle, for anyone to put enough toward retirement that will enable him to live another 20-30 years. A life span of 85-95 is swiftly becoming the new norm. The only workers today who are the exception to this reality, and have any hope of a lengthy retirement with comfort, are public service employees.
Taxpayers have been long bamboozled into making generous commitments to the retirement systems of public service workers. All over the country, in all levels of federal and state governments, these defined benefit plan pension funds have proven to be vastly untenable. Yet to sustain the plans in their current arrangements and cover the obligations that have already been promised, the rest of society will be duty-bound/compelled to contribute to the retirement of those public service workers via higher taxes. This is turn makes the rest of the populace poorer — because their hard-earned money is being levied to the promised public pensioner, and not for able to be saved for themselves.
The grand scheme is becoming unhinged. One must realize that the more people continue to buy into the idea that they are supposed to “retire at 65”, the more they are suckered into continuing make their retirement years poorer and subsequently make the retirement years of public service employees richer. People see a public service worker being able to retire at that age and they think “I should be able to also do so”. This idea needs to change.
There are two reasons why most people think that such pension programs are still sustainable and normal: their troubles are largely masked because they encompass the larger budget process of federal/state/local governments (and how many people pay attention?) and the costs to keep the programs afloat are borne by all the rest of society — the taxpayers. This arrangement enables a small group of people to be paid a sizeable and continuous pension for until death. It is not out of the ordinary anymore for a person to receive $65K- $100K for the rest of their life. But the actuarial cost to provide that promised benefit is astronomical.
With the lifespan of Americans growing longer, retiring at 65 is no longer viable; the systems are badly strained. And it is certainly not rational for the longevity of Social Security and Medicare either. Yet the steadfast refusal of most of government to overhaul retirement systems or make age and formula adjustments to entitlement programs — in order to maintain this retirement facade — only compounds the problem.
Another one of the biggest detriments of being able to retire at 65 is investment return. Interest rates have been historically low for the last six years and there is a strong likelihood of them staying low for another few. As a result, peoples’ retirement portfolios have lagged in their anticipated growth and goals. The low rates mean less money overall for retirement time, a problem which can be offset by continuing to work and contribute to a retirement fund past the basic age.
Likewise, inflation is not the issue that everyone thinks it is. The true problem is the cost of living — but really, it’s the cost of modern living, the “keeping up with the Jones”. For example, newer models of everything due to technology constantly changing — upgrading TVs, cell phones, etc. are raising the bar for how much pensioners want to comfortably live on and live with.
In sum, with living longer, low rates of return, and the “cost of Jones’s increase”, people must begin to realize that the time span between 65 – 80 can be, and should be, a healthy and productive time of life. Working, staying active, and continuing to save will be beneficial in the long run. The mindset of older citizens needs to change and they need to understand that they can should aim to be productive until they are 80. At 65 they can certainly slow down, but the concept of retiring and not working anymore at that age is unrealistic and unaffordable.
UPDATE (5/5/15): USA Today has an article today just on this subject: “Traditional retirement possibly becoming a thing of the past”:
“A new survey of American workers from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found that 82% of the respondents age 60 and older either are, or expect to keep working past the age of 65. Among all workers, regardless of age, 20% expect to keep on working as long as possible in their current job or a similar one.
“The days of the gold-watch retirement where we have an office party and maybe some punch and cookies and never work again are more mythical than a reality,” said Catherine Collinson, president of the retirement studies center. “Very few workers actually envision that type of retirement and many plan to keep on working part-time even after they retire.
“It even raises the question is retirement the right word.”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAX TIPS, TAXES
A recent article by the National Review brought to light how the IRS has taken on the role of “rules interpretation” in recent years, which is beyond its scope as the nation’s tax collecting agency. The most notorious example of this new role is highlighted in the King vs Burwell case before the Supreme Court — where the IRS interpreted the language of Obamacare other than what was expressly written down as law. However, as the National Review discusses, the IRS has grown accustomed to interpreting law as it sees fit, without the oversight of Congress. Therein lies the problem.
With Burwell, the question being debated is over the letter of the law vs the spirit of the law. As Obamacare was written, tax subsidies were available for federal exchanges (letter of the law). As the IRS is the administrator, so to speak, of the subsidies, it interpreted that line of law to apply to all healthcare exchanges (spirit of the law) and ruled that subsidies were available for both federal and state exchanges, even though Obamacare never specified state exchanges, only federal. The federal government was sued, claiming that the IRS had not the power to administer subsidies beyond what was written, passed, and voted into law. SCOTUS will issue its ruling on the matter later this summer.
The question of rules interpretation is an interesting one. How much power, if any, does the IRS have in sorting out the minutiae of detail in the myriad of tax credits and subsidies that the tax code is riddled with?
The potential for abuse is certainly there. The National Review article focused on just one type of tax credit, the “production tax credit” (PTC) which applied to wind-energy producers, and all the changes the IRS made to the rules regarding this tax credit over the past few years:
*“In December 2012, Congress extended the production tax credit (PTC) to cover wind-energy producers who were in the beginning stages of construction by the subsidy’s cutoff date. The IRS clarified shortly thereafter that wind-farm projects would be able to receive the special tax giveaway if they spent as little as 5 percent of the construction costs.”
*“In April 2013, the IRS apparently decided the tax credit wasn’t large enough. So it simply raised the value of the PTC from $22 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced to $23 per megawatt-hour. Voilà — more federal spending courtesy of you, the taxpayer.”
*“In September 2013, the IRS went a step further. It expanded the PTC to cover wind-farm projects that generate power before the end of 2015, despite the fact that the PTC for all projects was set to expire at the end of 2013. The IRS also said in the notice that even projects that come online after that might still qualify; the agency intends to make decisions on a project-by-project basis.”
*“In August 2014, the IRS decided it would not only pay wind-energy developers for each megawatt-hour they produce. It would also allow them to sell a project — regardless of whether it was completed — and use the selling costs they incur to count toward qualifying for the PTC.”
*“The IRS also loosened its requirement that companies need to spend only 5 percent of construction costs to qualify. The agency said it would consider only the nature of the work (such as digging foundations, installing transformers, building roads), not the extent or the cost of the overall project. This more subjective standard gave the IRS even more leeway in doling out government subsidies.”
*In March 2015, the IRS loosened the PTC eligibility requirements yet again. The agency clarified what “begin construction” means. Under the new guidance, if a wind-project developer began construction on a new facility prior to January 1, 2015, and places the project in service before January 1, 2017, then the facility will be considered to be in progress for the purposes of receiving the PTC. This is regardless of the amount of physical work performed or the amount of costs paid or incurred within that amount of time.”
The PTC tax credit, between December 2012 and March 2015, had its rules significantly altered by the IRS. The crux of the issue, however, is the fact that this happened without any congressional oversight. The IRS workers, the ones making the decisions on these rules, are unelected, and accountable to no one. And yet, the changing of the tax credit affects the taxpayer. National Review notes, “While the PTC has historically averaged roughly $5 billion per year, the most recent one-year extension will cost taxpayers $13 billion.” That is an alarming expansion of taxpayer money just in this particular credit instance, without the approval of Congress.
This is also an effect of the larger problem of Congress using the tax code to pick winners and losers. Here, we have special tax credits to companies in order to push “green energy”. It is the essence of crony capitalism, where politicians trade favors and barters to support certain initiatives or restrict others via new taxes or credits. They’re basically all gimmicks to aid in reelection or pander to a portion of the electorate — and then we never get rid of all the tacked-on programs and policies because no one wants to give up their special initiatives.
The code has grown immensely complex. And now we have the IRS regularly going beyond its authority as well. The IRS must be reigned in from interpreter of law back to mere enforcer, as it goes about its business of tax collection. As such, Congress would also do well to reduce the amount of crony capitalism it engages in and stop playing games with our tax code.
