Politicians Keep Cutting the Wrong Taxes
Forget income-tax cuts. It's FICA that needs cutting for lower-income workers.
Phil Keisling.
About 29 percent of all ballots in the 2024 election were sent in by mail. That’s down from 43 percent in 2020, when Covid kept many people away from polling places, but it’s higher than the 21 percent in 2016. Voting by mail has expanded voter turnout, which still distresses Donald Trump (at the moment he’s threatening not to sign any other legislation until it’s sharply curtailed) even though mail-in balloting confers no evident partisan advantage. Indeed, I’ve long suspected Trump lost the 2020 election in part because his paranoid rants against voting by mail discouraged his voters from doing so. The rest of us are grateful that ballots are now mailed routinely. The main person to thank is my friend Phil Keisling, who as Oregon’s secretary of state was instrumental in pioneering vote-by-mail.
I knew Phil back when he was a journalist in the early 1980s. He was a superb one, adept at mastering an extremely complex subject like the collapse of Penn Central and rendering the stakes legible to the non-expert. We ended up working together as editors at the Washington Monthly, alongside the late Jonathan Rowe, about whose writing on “the commons” I’ve discussed elsewhere. Our mentor was the late Washington Monthly founding editor Charlie Peters, who I’ve written about, too. Bliss it was in that dawn etc.
But we were talking about Phil, who for me has always been both friend and tutor.
Another hobby horse of Phil’s is the unfairness of the payroll tax. About 70 percent of all Americans pay more in the regressive FICA tax than they do in the (at least somewhat) progressive) income tax. When Republicans boast that they’ve reduced taxes the benefit goes mostly to the rich, but whatever scraps ordinary Americans get are scarcely noticeable because their FICA tax is two or three times larger than their income tax. This is all covered in my latest New Republic piece. It is heavily Phil-influenced. You can read it here.
What we need to do is cut % the various FICA percentages and then remove the cap on how much each tax payer can be charged. Then require that all individuals pay these new %s on all income from all sources (income, interest ( income from subchaper S corps and proprietor owned business included)
, dividends, including any off-shore entities). Include Social Security taxes in this reform. Doing this would provide enough revenue to put these programs in the black and should enable to finally provide us with universal health care.
What's the breakdown on percentage of FICA to total tax receipts. I'm gonna look it up but, if memory serves, it is the lion's share.