….for a little while....
A retail tax on sugary beverages makes sense.
Read the full post on my new website:
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Monday, November 28, 2016
Thursday, October 13, 2016
The “golden years”—does anyone still say that?
Americans who aren't retired yet say they're going to keep working for a
while….recently they said 66 is the average age when they plan to clean out the
desk and head for home.
I think that's optimistic.
They're probably going to work a little longer than that, because a lot of
folks are getting the idea that Social Security benefits aren't going to get a
whole lot better in their realistically attainable future, and, anyway,
most folks who are still working only have about one egg in the old
retirement account….
A Gallup poll recently said that folks who are
already retired hung up their track shoes at the average age of 61. In the
early 1990s that number was 57, so part of the reason that retirees are getting
older, aside from increasing life expectancy, is that they're waiting longer to
punch out.
The whole notion of
"retiring" is a relatively new concept. You only have to look back to
the pre-World War II era to see a world in which the average person basically
expected to work until she died, or became too sick or frail to work anymore.
American society hasn't
completely figured out this retirement thing yet.
If you're in your
prime, you really need to think carefully about the current and long term
effects of government policies on your personal future. Congress isn't doing
anything that makes sense right now.
All of us need to take
personal responsibility for retirement, and we have to make sure the government
doesn't screw it up..
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
The other boondoggler….
The horror of Trump’s lies continues.
Meanwhile, Paul Ryan is still doing his
thing, inviting careless journalists to call him a policy wonk while he
continues to offer the standard claptrap about helping Americans by giving more
money to the super rich.
WashingtonPost.com pointed out
yesterday that the latest incarnation of House Speaker Ryan’s “tax plan” would funnel 99.6
percent of the proposed tax cuts to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans,
according to the Tax Policy Center.
The stupefying bottom line: the 1 percenters
would get average annual savings of about $240,000 per household.
Last year, the median household income
for all Americans was $56,500—that’s the median, meaning half had more and half
had less.
So Ryan’s tax chicanery means that the
richest 1% would get tax SAVINGS equal to more than four times the amount of
PRE-TAX total income that the median household earned last year.
That’s not a tax plan. That’s legalized
robbery.
Let’s not even talk about what the
Republicans want to do about business taxes.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Pay your taxes to rebuild schools
About half of all American schools were
built more than 50 years ago, and they’re wearing out. Get ready to pony up
your school taxes to renovate and rebuild them.
 |
| 1950s school building |
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives “public school facilities” a grade of “D” because of declining budgets
for building maintenance, repairs and new construction.
Many of our schools are nearing the end
of their useful life.
You want your kids to go to decent,
safe schools, right?
You know what you have to do.
 |
| 1950s school for black kids |
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Book review: America Ascendant
Stanley
B. Greenberg, America
Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and
leading the 21st Century
New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press,
2015
406 pages
Doubtless
you’ve been wondering what’s going on in American politics, our Congress, our
state governments and the Republican Party. Greenberg offers many answers in America Ascendant.
He expects we
are witnessing the slow unraveling of what ails our body politic: civil
dysfunction, the concentration of greed/power/wealth, the conspicuously
parochial Republican/conservative/rightwing points of view, and the blatant
bigotry that too often masks itself with dissembling, righteous talk of
“traditional” American “values” like self-reliance, commitment to family,
Jeffersonian “small government” and religious faith. Greenberg expects that
better days are coming, but he cautions that the process will be achingly and
devastatingly slow.
His essential
message is that America is inexorably becoming a less white and more diverse
nation—most abundantly, a nation of immigrants, and a nation undeniably
represented by young generations of folks who are tolerant and happy to live
their lives with culturally and racially and sexually diverse friends, lovers,
marriage partners, neighbors and coworkers—the folks who consciously wish to
live their lives unfettered by the domination of a select few with great wealth
and great power.
To those of
us who have struggled to understand the motivations and fears and dreams of the
folks who support the divisive and hurtful and dangerous and self-interested
antics of so many politicians, America
Ascendant offers much more understanding than I have encountered from any
other source.
What Greenberg says is not pretty. His book suggests that a good outcome is possible.
I want to
believe his message.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
I didn’t bother on Thursday night
About
225 million grownups in America didn’t watch the Republican debate or
He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named last Thursday night. I was one of them.
The
audience for the GOP debate on Fox was 12.5 million, about 5% of adults in the
U.S. Roughly 2.7 million—about 1%--tuned in to the DJT event benefitting
military veterans.
The
rest of us were doing other things: hoping the next president will use the full
powers of the Oval Office to do good things for America, like improving education,
boosting infrastructure investment and creating jobs, reducing carbon emissions
to tackle the global climate change horror, increasing taxes on the very
wealthy, taking steps to fight the greedy power of corporations and Wall Street….
You
fill in the hopes I forgot to mention….
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Social Security….not for everyone
Social Security is with us for the long haul.
I think it’s a vital
foundation element of a reasonably secure society. I think high-income earners
should pay a lot more in Social Security taxes (we should raise the maximum for
taxable earnings). I think the full-benefit retirement age should be raised.
One of the reasons for the parlous state of Social Security finances is
that people are living a lot longer than any politician or policy maker could
have imagined in 1935.
The average life expectancy of folks being born now is about 79 years.
Thus, the average newborn can expect to collect Social Security benefits for
quite a few years under current law.
In 1935, when the Social Security Act was signed into law, the average
life expectancy for newborns was about 61 years.
The act provided for benefits to be paid starting at age 65. Thus, the
average person born that year wouldn’t live long enough to collect anything.
Think about that.
The official assumption was that a majority of the folks who lived all
their lives with an anticipation of Social Security benefits would never get a
dime.
The increase in longevity in the last 80 years has been spectacularly
greater than any scientist or statistician or politician imagined during much
of that time.
Another footnote in Social Security history:
Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, VT, received the first monthly benefit on
January 31, 1940. During her work career she paid a total of $24.75 in Social
Security taxes. She died when she was 100 years old after collecting total
benefits of $22,888.92.
Think yin and yang.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
“Simplify” the tax code?
It’s more or less
criminally deceptive for our elected representatives in Washington to keep
dissing the federal tax code as “too long, too complicated, too burdensome.”
Here’s the latest:
Sen. Orrin Hatch
(R-UT) said recently “First of all, we’ve got to take
a look at the code itself. You’re talking about 70,000 pages and we got to
skinny that down to where people can understand it.”
Indeed.
The tax
code is bloated with exceptions, deductions, givebacks, exemptions, waivers and
special language favoring specific industries and even specific companies—all
designed to reduce the tax liability of big companies, small companies and
individuals. A hundred years ago the entire tax code was 400 pages.
Let’s
start “simplifying” the federal tax code by getting rid of all that stuff, and
then see where we stand.
I think
most people could understand that.
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)