To get Social Security don’t you actually have to have had a job where money was paid into the fund? If not, boy oh boy has my retirement gotten easier.
I’m 48 years old and I try to explain to my younger coworkers that they shouldn’t count on having SS around when they retire. Heck, retirement may be a boomer thing that ceases to exist. I kinda see folks just transitioning to P/T jobs when they can no longer maintain a full time job. I’m amazed by the number of folks who look at going on disability as a career/retirement strategy.
I truly believe we’re coming closer, and closer to the time in this country when we have more people living off the “system” then we have people working and paying into, and thus supporting our current system of taxes and benefits. When we reach that point the “system” is bound to collapse.
I have a suspicion we’re there already, but it’s being kept from us to avoid discouraging us from earning.
[The Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick] Mulvaney declared, “The top 20 percent of folks who file a tax return, the top 20 percent, pay 95 percent of the taxes.”
OMB later cited internal data to the Washington Examiner that said the top 20 percent of people to pay income taxes account for 94.8 percent of those taxes in 2016.
That appears to be a jump from just a few years ago. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 20 percent of income earners paid 84 percent of income taxes.
Mulvaney explained:
If you break the income tax universe into what we call quintiles, so equal sized 20 percent columns, the first two columns, the first quintile and the lower quintile, don’t pay any taxes at all. In fact they net positive. We pay them when they file a tax return.
That middle quintile, which you might describe, some people do, as middle class, pays an effective rate in the low single digits. And all of the taxes are paid by folks in the top two quintiles, and that last quintile pays almost fully, 95 percent I think, of the taxes.
rimshot
Badda-bing, badda-boom!
To get Social Security don’t you actually have to have had a job where money was paid into the fund? If not, boy oh boy has my retirement gotten easier.
I’m 48 years old and I try to explain to my younger coworkers that they shouldn’t count on having SS around when they retire. Heck, retirement may be a boomer thing that ceases to exist. I kinda see folks just transitioning to P/T jobs when they can no longer maintain a full time job. I’m amazed by the number of folks who look at going on disability as a career/retirement strategy.
I truly believe we’re coming closer, and closer to the time in this country when we have more people living off the “system” then we have people working and paying into, and thus supporting our current system of taxes and benefits. When we reach that point the “system” is bound to collapse.
I have a suspicion we’re there already, but it’s being kept from us to avoid discouraging us from earning.