taxes on social security -Sanders Proposes Social Security Tax Hike For Wealthy

Editor: Johnathan Meyers | Tactical Investor

Democrats like Sanders want to raise taxes on social security

“We will raise taxes,” the Vermont Senator told a crowd at the CNN Democratic town hall this week. “Yes, we will.”

Sanders, who is neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in Iowa and leading New Hampshire, has proposed an array of ambitious new government programs, from free college tuition and paid family leave to universal health care, and recently dropped a new tax plan explaining how he’d pay for it all.

“It’s a very, very, very big tax increase for everyone except those at the bottom,” Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told TIME.

Take, for example, Sanders’ plan to provide universal, single-payer healthcare. Sanders says he’d pay for that with a new 2.2% income-based “health care premium” tax, as well as a 6.2% payroll tax paid for by employers. That adds up to a big increase—but it also means that, in exchange, Americans would save the thousands of dollars they spend every year on premiums, deductibles and other out-of-pocket health care costs.

The typical American family of four covered by an employer-sponsored health care plan paid $24,671 last year on health care costs alone, according to the non-partisan Milliman Medical Ind Full Story

Bernie Sanders: Raise taxes on the wealthy to save Social Security

“If Republicans are serious about extending the solvency of Social Security beyond 2033, I hope they will join me in scrapping the cap that allows multi-millionaires to pay a much smaller percentage of their income into Social Security than the middle class,” Sanders said.

The Social Security trust fund that provides benefits to retired and disabled people is largely funded by the payroll tax. Right now, 6.2 percent of the payroll tax income from employees and employers is allotted to Social Security, and then that revenue is divided between the two funds.

The amount of earnings that are subject to the payroll tax each year is capped, however, at $118,500.

“That is patently unfair,” Sanders said. “If we apply the Social Security payroll tax to income above $250,000, we could immediately bring in enough revenue to the Social Security trust fund to extend it for decades and also be able to increase benefits.” Full Story

Democrats like Sanders want to raise taxes on social security

Bernie Sanders: Raise taxes on the wealthy to save Social Security

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