This is called a regressive tax. The Republican party should embrace the word regression. Their followers are too stupid to understand its meaning anyway.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Really interesting to see how vocal people are about this topic before they even know how this particular tax and distribution program works.
The reason this works out that way is because there is a wage base for the social security tax. If you don’t make more than that base then you pay that tax all year long. If you’re making 1m then you pay that tax for like the first two months and then nothing afterwards. The solution to this is just removing the wage base. If you make 1m you should pay the same percentage as everybody else on all your earnings. Magically the social security system will be overfunded.
So what you're saying is, social security should be, like...social?
It'd also be nice if it offered actual security.
The other thing to get rid of is long term capital gains taxes and just tax capital gains as regular income.
Explain please? It's about the tax rate between those two? I thought the problem with CGT is that people dodge it by taking loans secured by their capital/stock. This does not seem to fix this problem...
LTCG means that I can 15% or 20% (depending on income) on selling stock even if I'm otherwise in a high tax bracket. Why should I get to have a massive tax break just because I already have a lot of income? There's nothing special about my income from stock vs. my income from employment other than I work a hell of a lot harder for my income from employment than I do my income from stock.
0% if your taxable income is under $96,700 as a married, filing jointly household.
We're talking about a cap and not a base, but yeah... remove the cap and everything gets better.
That’s effectively what it is but it’s called the social security wage base.
TIL - interesting language... even the article goes on to call it a cap multiple times even though the official title is what you listed. Thanks for sharing!
Over funded how? Right now they still collect social security. Are you suggesting they should pay more into SS and then collect less to turn it into a tax?
Pay their fair share is what it is called.6
The taps at the top needs to open less for the trickling down to happen, that's common sense! /$
Are the benefits you might receive dependent on how much you contribute?
This seems very "American". As in, superior American-style-freedom because everyone pays for their own social security.
Social security has a max payout, so it also has a cap on the taxes you pay into it.
At a surface level, it makes sense, which is why it continues.
Once you look into it even a little bit further, the max payout needs to stay, but the tax cap needs to be removed.
I'm pretty sure they are. The more you pay into the system, the more you get at retirement age. But, it's also capped. I'm assuming that's the rationale behind capping the tax.
Well. They pay the same on everything up to each threshold.
They do, but the percentage of what they owe compared to income is low. If I paid only first bracket of my income, and then skimmed on the upper brackets, the IRS would hunt me down