Employees earning $90,000 pays $6,885 a year for SS and Medicare. Their employers matches it, so together they put away $13,770 every single year.
A self-employed person earning about $97,000 pays the entire $13,770.
As I have written before, if that money was invested in long term safe Treasury Bonds, they would have over $1.750 million dollars saved up after 40 years of work. Perhaps, if they had to buy disability policies or term life insurance they'd have $1.6 million saved up. If they died at 65, all that money would go to their family.
So, let's look what that would buy them in a decreasing monthly annuity:
$1.6 million at 5% for 25 years live to 90= $9,353 per month.
$1.6 million at 5% for 30 years live to 95= $8,589 per month.
$1.6 million at 5% for 25 years live to 100= $8075 per month.
Currently, having that kind of earnings record for that many years gives you about $1,900 month in Soc Security and with Medicare ($500 per month) that's equivalent to about $2,400 per month.
If you have no other savings, what can that buy you? Around here, a two bedroom apartment is around $2,000 a month and a one bedroom is about $1,800. That's on Long Island, not Manhattan. So, you have $100 a month left for EVERYTHING else? So after paying in the maximum for 40 years, you are poverty stricken after your rent is paid.
If the Democrats get fooled yet another time and it looks like it is going that way, and they end up passing a withholding tax increased and the age of eligibility extended, the picture will be even worse.
I guaranty you that anyone in that $90,000 category would rather have $9,000 a month than $2,400 a month, with a large asset built up to give to their beneficiaries. Those people do not want to have to pay for EVERYONE else. I don't want to pay for everyone else until the nation's super wealthy pays also. This is one cruel trick played on the middle and upper middle classes and Democrats are too stupid to see it.
Bush doesn't want to end Social Security, not for one second. If he did, all his friends in business and all his wealthy stockholder friends at the country clubs would have to share in the cost of the retirement of immigrants, low paid people and people getting paid off the books, a class of low paid or low reporting people that the "business class" and the "wealthy class" created and benefits from. This low paid class was not created by the hard working middle class Americans who have practically all the responsibility of funding their own retirement, as well as the retirment of immigrants, including those here for 10 years or more, people having the extra cash all their lives because they were paid off the books and for the lower paid Americans, whose wages are inhumanly low because immigrants are here to take jobs at $5.15 an hour. This is what Paul Krugman was trying to tell us in his mini-debate with Joel Klein. He was trying to tell us how the middle class was getting screwed violently while the wealthiest Americans are getting gifts.
So, to the Democratic Party, be careful of your compromises because you could lose millions of votes unless you make the Social Security burden fair and shared by everyone.
All Bush wants to do is to create a boon for Wall Street by giving them 50 million new accounts. He and his friends love it that middle class Americans pay for the Social Security and Medicare for all the immigrants and low paid Americans who work at Wal-Mart and all the people get most of their wages paid off the books. This is a ruse and the Democratic Party had better see it!
If we want to have a $5.15 an hour minimum wage, if we want to pay for the Social Security of Americans who get paid most of their wages off the books and if we want immigration, EVERYONE has to pay for it, not just the middle class.