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Show Tell It Like It Is This year as wage earners have noticed on their pay-check deduction for Federal taxes, the tab for "social security" has been substantially increased. The base tax rate jumped from 9.6 to 10.4; one-half one-half of which is deducted from the earnings of the worker before he gets his pay-check, and the other half (theoretically, at least) deducted "after" he receives re-ceives his wages. Actually, of course, the worker never sees any part of the money; the whole amount is deposited by the company in a special account which is then turned turn-ed over to the Federal Government. To say (as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare alleges) that the employee pays half, and then "the company pays half" of the social security se-curity tax, is a crude deception. There is not a single sin-gle business establishment in this country, large or small, that possesses a magic money tree or which has the authority to print nine, new dollar bills. All of the money paid out by each firm, whether in the form of wages, taxes, rent, utilities and other operating oper-ating expenses must come from the earned income of that business. If the business, based on these existing ex-isting expenses don't earn it, the company can't pay it period. If the company brings in a little more money than it pays out in combined expenses and salaries, then it will make a profit. But if it brings in less money than that expended including "both halves" of the Social Security Tax then that company goes broke. Thus a worker in the $5000 bracket (by Government Govern-ment reckoning) is now tapped for $520, as against $480 last year; one half of this amount is reported on the paycheck, but the other half is simply turned over to the Government without anything being said about it. But the biggest increase hit the wage earner earn-er in the $9,000 bracket, which increased from $748 in 1970 to $936 in 1971. As long as we have the Social Security Tax, why not be honest about what is actually costing us. |