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The truth about the raid on payroll taxes
Posted Aug 17, 2010 by Tom Jackson
Updated Aug 17, 2010 at 10:59 PM
Far be it from me to quibble with the superior wisdom of the folks on the News Center’s editorial board, but there’s one portion of their otherwise fine evaluation of America’s Social Security fix (”Escaping fiscal fantasy”) that is open to reconsideration. The editorial says, in part:
There is no dispute that the Social Security money has been borrowed and spent. One way of looking at it is that spending excess payroll taxes helped keep income taxes low.
Yes. That is one way of looking at it. The other way, not mentioned in the piece, is that the persistent raid on Social Security taxes that has left nothing but trillions in IOUs in the federal treasury enabled reckless, irresponsible spending conducted by virtually every president and every Congress since Social Security and its (former) surplusses were rolled into a combined budget during Lyndon Johnson’s guns-n-butter Great Society era.
Folding payroll taxes into Washington’s operating budget simply fueled the flames of excess in ways otherwise unimaginable. There never was a time during the last 50 years when a governing majority of Americans would have approved the income tax increases necessary to support our history of runaway spendthriftery. To say, then, that blowing excess payroll taxes kept income taxes low is to take the narrowest possible viewpoint. It is far more accurate to site nearly a half-century of outright thievery for enabling absurd, and otherwise insupportable—politically and fiscally—spending.
And spending—not finding ways to hike taxes—is what we have to get a handle on.
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