(if I were the) King of the Forest

So yes, if you want to be pedantic about it Social Security is not in trouble at all. It is covered by the trust fund. The managers of the Social Security Administration can sleep well at night knowing they’ve served us well in securing the benefits they’ve promised.

But unless we do something clever, and fairly soon, the federal government as a whole will be in trouble because of Social Security. To me that is a distinction without a difference.

The question, then, for both Presidential candidates is: What do you think is a “fair” tax rate? What is a “fair share” for any individual citizen, whether or not they are “rich”?

And, even more importantly, on what basis do you make that determination?

…prioritizing and making tradeoffs is infinitely more difficult when the government has made promises in flush times that it is hard-pressed to keep in lean times. And yet that seems to be the default mode of operation: commit windfalls when the economy is strong to long-term and popular causes, like entitlements and salaries and program expansions, that are politically difficult to rescind when the windfall evaporates.

If revenues were estimated and allocated based on the mean over some suitable period — say a typical business cycle — then decisions about priorities could be made in a relatively stable fiscal environment without the periodic panics that characterize the present budgeting process.

Here we are in the thick of the election season and, as always happens during such times, we hear endless declarations from the candidates about the various problems that they will fix for us if we will only vote for them, and endless discussion from activists and advocates and self-declared victims and would-be policy-makers about […]

The only way rising property values lead to rising tax bills is if the government chooses to treat the tax rate as an inevitable force of nature rather than as the financial throttle which matches total valuation to total revenue; that is, if government chooses to use rising valuations as an excuse to collect and spend more than they could otherwise have done.

Jack Connors, Jr. argues (12 Jun) that the current revenue surplus in Massachusetts should be spent on increased Medicare reimbursements rather than being returned to the taxpayers from which it derived…using them to increase reimbursements for Medicare – or to fund benefit increases for any other entitlement program – is the worst possible use for the money.

My wife and I are worried about having enough money for a comfortable retirement. With the states of the economy and the world as they are we have been quite anxious. So I’ve come up with a plan:

I find this indifference to the very real cash-flow obligations with which we are saddling our children and grandchildren dismaying. I wrote this as yet another attempt to convince them – and their equally insouciant readers – to take those obligations seriously

The current debate over reform of the Social Security system has taken on all the qualities of an argument between 6-year-olds, reduced in essence to the intellectual content of the classic “Is not!”, “Is so!”.

There may be aspects of the new tax proposals that would shift tax burden from rich to poor, but the elimination of deductions for state and local taxes would not seem to be among them. Could it be that the primary outrage is not with the plan itself but with the fact that George Bush and the Republican Congress are the ones who get to propose it?