If all you are relying on is Wikipedia as a credible source, then you should reexamine YOUR position.
Since you obviously didn't read the article, perhaps you should have noted the multiple external citations explaining what the Wikipedia article says.
Wikipedia articles are externally cited, you see.
Would you prefer I simply cited each of them to you directly so that you could read all of them? Or are you capable of clicking on a link and reading them yourself?
SS deficits don't add to the national debt, as your story notes, because it draws upon a fund.
A raise in the SS payroll tax cap would easily cover SS' continued operation indefinitely.
on march one, the GOVT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE reported an entire HALF TRILLION DOLLARS of waste, fraud and abuse in govt spending
It's clear you never read the report. Don't worry, I got it for you.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11318sp.pdf
Take a look at the items. None of them are, "We need to cut entitlements." A whole lot are, "If we restructure bureaucracy X, we can eliminate unnecessary duplication of work." Some _big_ ones concern the DoD.
It's not a non-sequitur, you just don't understand the history. When those tax cuts happened in the 80s, Reagan got the Democrats to go along with it by agreeing to end all of the tax deductions that were there when the highest marginal tax rate was about 70%. The result was that the effective tax rate did not change much.
And then they reinstated them, which was very clever on the part of the conservatives. It's clear that, in retrospect, dropping the tax rate was a very bad idea.
From that article:
The thing you just linked said:
However, 2009 tax collections, at 15% of GDP, were the lowest level of the past 50 years and 4.5 percentage points lower than Hauser's Law suggests. The Heritage Foundation has stated that the recent world economic recession pushed receipts to a level significantly below the historical average.
Also, kind of silly that conservatives excuse a law that supposedly links a major economic metric with taxes, with what is essentially the underperformance of that metric.
It's not a generous assumption. European countries have much higher tax rates than the US, but get about the same fraction of revenue/GDP.
You clearly never actually looked at the linked list of
List of countries by tax revenue as percentage of GDP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Because you're wrong and in fact, Hauser's Law is very clearly not the case in practice, and is total bunk. Seriously, Brazil has massively higher tax by GDP than we do.
Brazil!
Is it so much to ask for people on the internet to do their homework on what we're talking about? I mean, it's the internet, this information is all freely available to anyone who knows how to work google a bit.
