Not surprisingly — your tax point is completely incorrect.
From that article:
Increasing or eliminating Social Security’s cap on taxable wages, now $118,500 a year. Raising the cap would help mitigate the erosion of Social Security’s payroll tax base caused by rising wage inequality. Most workers’ taxes would not change, while the degree of increase in high earners’ taxes would depend on whether the cap were raised or eliminated. Raising the tax cap could increase higher earners’ benefits as well, depending on how policymakers treated newly taxed earnings. Changes to the tax cap could close roughly a quarter to nearly nine-tenths of Social Security’s solvency gap, depending on how they were structured.
So who would pay those additional taxes on income above $118k?
From that article:
If you want to cross the top 10% mark, you’ll still need a six-figure income but the numbers aren’t quite as high. The IRS sets the adjusted gross income cutoff required to be in the 10% group at $133,445, based on 2014 tax data. Once again, the average household income for the top 10% of earners is higher, at $295,845.
So up to 9/10ths of the entire future (not present) Social Security gap can be covered by those in the top 12–13% of wage earners.
Is that the middle class? Not fucking hardly.
From that article.
Between 2015 and 2016, US median household income rose 3.2% from $57,230 to $59,039, according to a new report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday.
So those theoretical additional Social Security payroll taxes would only start at people with payroll income at twice the median US income. Not the middle class.
